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Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

openai.com

21–30 of 270 posts

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#21
post #19

This kind of just sounds like junk that will clog up the context window I'll have try it out though to know for sure

I've been finding with these large context windows that context window length is no longer the bottleneck for me — the LLM will start to hallucinate / fail to find the stuff I want from the text long before I hit the context window limit.

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#22
post #9
post #7

So, so, so curious how they are implementing this.

I wouldn't be surprised if they essentially just add it to the prompt. ("You are ChatGPT... You are talking to a user that prefers cats over dogs and is afraid of spiders, prefers bullet points over long text...").

I think RAG approach with Vector DB is more likely. Just like when you add a file to your prompt / custom GPTs.

Adding the entire file (or memory in this case) would take up too much of the context. So just query the DB and if there's a match add it to the prompt after the conversation started.

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if they essentially just add it to the prompt. ("You are ChatGPT... You are talking to a user that prefers cats over dogs and is afraid of spiders, prefers bullet points over long text...").

I think RAG approach with Vector DB is more likely. Just like when you add a file to your prompt / custom GPTs. Adding the entire file (or memory in this case) would take up too much of the context. So just query the DB and if there's a match add it to the prompt after the conversation started.

These "memories" seem rather short, much shorter than the average document in a knowledge base or FAQ, for example. Maybe they do get compressed to embedding vectors, though.

I could imagine that once there's too many, it would indeed make sense to classify them as a database, though: "Prefers cats over dogs" is probably not salient information in too many queries.

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#24
post #2

I love this idea and it leads me to a question for everyone here. I've done a bunch of user interviews of ChatGPT, Pi, Gemini, etc. users and find there are two common usage patterns: 1. "Transactional" where every chat is a separate question, sort of like a Google search... People don't expect memory or any continuity between chats. 2. "Relationship-driven" where people chat with the LLM as if it's a friend or colle…

I use it exclusively in the "transactional" style, often even opening a new chat for the same topic when chatgpt is going down the wrong road

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#25
This seems like a really useful (and obvious) feature, but I wonder if this could lead to a kind of "AI filter bubble": What if one of its memories is "this user doesn't like to be argued with; just confirm whatever they suggest"?

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#26
post #19

This kind of just sounds like junk that will clog up the context window I'll have try it out though to know for sure

I've been finding with these large context windows that context window length is no longer the bottleneck for me — the LLM will start to hallucinate / fail to find the stuff I want from the text long before I hit the context window limit.

Yeah, there is basically a soft limit now where it just is less effective as the context gets larger

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#27
post #2

I love this idea and it leads me to a question for everyone here. I've done a bunch of user interviews of ChatGPT, Pi, Gemini, etc. users and find there are two common usage patterns: 1. "Transactional" where every chat is a separate question, sort of like a Google search... People don't expect memory or any continuity between chats. 2. "Relationship-driven" where people chat with the LLM as if it's a friend or colle…

My main usage of ChatGPT/Phind is for work-transactional things.

For those cases there are quite a few things that I'd like it to memorize, like programming library preferences ("When working with dates prefer `date-fns` over `moment.js`") or code style preferences ("When writing a React component, prefer function components over class components"). Currently I feed in those preferences via the custom instructions feature, but I rarely take some time to update them, so the memory future is a welcome addition here.

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#28
It is already ignoring your prompt and custom instructions. For example, If I explicity ask it to provide a code instead of an overview it will respond by apologizing and then provide the same overview answer with minimal if no code.

Will memory provide a solution to that or will be a different thing to ignore?

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#29
post #7

So, so, so curious how they are implementing this.

I've done similar before this feature launched to produce a viable behavior therapist AI. I ain't a doctor, viable to me was: it worked and remembered previous info as a base for next steps.

Periodically "compress" chat history into relevant context and keep that slice of history as part of the memory.

15 day message history could be condensed greatly and still produce great results.

Re: Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

#30
post #19

This kind of just sounds like junk that will clog up the context window I'll have try it out though to know for sure

I'm assuming that they have implemented it via a MemGPT-like approach, which doesn't clog the context window. The main pre-requisite for doing that is having good function calling, where OpenAI currently is significantly in the lead.
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