ChatGPT took a huge step forward into the personalization side of GenAI. MEMORY!
Note: I do feel quite special that I am in the “small portion” of ChatGPT users and am hugely excited by this feature.
One of the more frustrating things about working with ChatGPT is reminiscent of Henry (Adam Sandler) experienced in the movie “50 first dates”. ChatGPT, much like Lucy (Drew Barrymore) suffers from short-term memory loss and every time you chat, it forgets and the next chat is like starting over from scratch.
It causes prompts to have to be endlessly long containing many constraints or many iterations of multi-prompting, narrowing down of answers through more and more detailed prompts. Yes, you can return to conversations, but I have found that often causes hallucinations and you can also create custom instructions or CustomGPTs but those still that are workarounds the casual user won’t utilize.
Ok, if you haven't seen the movie and don't get the reference here is the summary from IMBD. It is a decent RomCom flick check it out.
"Henry Roth is a man afraid of commitment until he meets the beautiful Lucy. They hit it off and Henry think he's finally found the girl of his dreams until discovering she has short-term memory loss and forgets him the next day."
I heard rumors this could happen but didn’t expect it this quickly; today ChatGPT launched a new feature where it has memory. It can start to learn about you and your preferences, it is a major step forward in creating your own personal assistant bot. (how cool is that!?)
Say you are using it for planning what is for dinner. You can tell it on time that you are vegetarian and it will remember it vs. having to add that detail every single time you chat with it. Or planning a night out with friends, tell it one time you are in Cincinnati and it will remember it and hopefully only suggest things in town.
Diving into the FAQs this is obviously still in beta mode but they have provided functionality to opt out, clear history, see what it is tracking, and not track sensitive information “We’re taking steps to assess and mitigate biases, and steer ChatGPT away from proactively remembering sensitive information” which should make people more comfortable.
This could be another leap forward and is similar to some of the promises in Microsoft CoPilot, but is beyond working in windows. I am personally excited to try it out.
