Memory updated: ChatGPT learns to get to the point

🤖 "The user prefers to receive just the command without any introductory prose"

OpenAI is rolling out Memory in ChatGPT.

The feature promises to transform the ChatGPT experience from generic to personal. The chatbot assistant will now learn to remember our preferences and details of our lives; and use this knowledge to better serve us in the future.

Asking for compression

The simplest use case goes something like this. We ask ChatGPT how to reduce the size of an image on the command line:

By default, GPT-4 starts every answer with some introductory prose explaining what it’s about to do:

and only after that it actually answers the question:

This is mildly annoying. If I was talking to a human, I could give them gentle feedback to get directly to the point.

Skip the prose

Well, with the Memory feature, we now can do just that:

I didn’t need to do anything special, I just responded in free text. ChatGPT realised there’s something to remember about this response and added a little chip indicating that it saved the information to memory. Specifically, what ChatGPT stored is:

When asked about command line commands, the user prefers to receive just the command without any introductory prose.

Memories

The memories are stored in a simple list of text snippets. Every time we start a new conversation with ChatGPT, all of the memories are passed to the LLM in the context window. This way, the LLM can use the information to better answer future queries.

Much better!

More on this

• ⏰ In 2023, Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder of DeepMind) predicted that In five years everybody will have access to an AI that knows you, is super smart, and understands your personal history. The clock is ticking :), features like ChatGPT Memory are a step towards that vision

• 🇺🇸 The Memory feature is only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and for now not available in Europe.

In other news

• 🤖 The next week will be interesting: Google hosts the annual Google I/O conference. Coincidentally Sam Altman is teasing new OpenAI features about to be announced a day before.

Postcard from San Francisco

A week in the Silicon Valley passed very fast. The sunny weather and nice running trails along the bay helped me make some progress on my vitamin D levels.

Have a sunny week 💫,
– Przemek