OpenAI has announced that it has started testing the ability for ChatGPT to remember things that users discuss with the chatbot, which will save users from having to repeat information and help the chatbot make more helpful conversations to offer a better user experience. The company is referring to the chatbot’s ability to remember things as ChatGPT’s “memory.”
ChatGPT can remember things in two ways
ChatGPT can remember things in two ways. First, the chatbot can pick up details from conversations. For example, if you ask it to write a birthday message for your wife whose name is Anna, it will remember that you have a wife and her name is Anna. So, the next time you ask the chatbot to write a birthday message for your wife, it will refer to your wife as Anna in the message. Second, you can ask the chatbot to remember something specific. For example, you can ask it to remember that you prefer to read things in bullet points. So, the next time you ask it to explain a topic, it will present the content to you in that format.
You can delete items from ChatGPT’s memory
If ChatGPT has picked up a detail from a chat or you have asked it to remember something but now you don’t want it to know those things, you can ask the chatbot to forget those things or delete those items from the settings page. If you want to have a chat without using memory, you can use “temporary chat.” You can think of it as an incognito mode where the chatbot doesn’t pick up any details from chats. Plus, OpenAI will not use chats from this mode to train its models. If you don’t want to use the memory feature for ChatGPT in any conversation, you can disable the feature altogether from settings.
Privacy and availability
OpenAI is making sure that ChatGPT doesn’t pick up sensitive details, such as your health data. However, the chatbot can remember those things if you specifically ask it to. At the moment, the company is rolling out memory to a limited number of users. Currently, there’s no information about when it will roll out the feature more widely. OpenAI says that it will make ChatGPT’s memory available to Team and Enterprise customers and Custom GPTs when it starts rolling out the feature more widely. In my opinion, OpenAI has taken the GenAI chatbot game to the next level with the latest feature.