We still seem to be missing an equivalent of explicit memory formation, serializing digested perceptions into working then short term and long term memory. The however many thousand tokens in a GPT's buffer can span a much larger span of time than the second's worth of sense impressions your brain can hold without consciousness[1] and memory getting involved but the principle seems to be the same.

This isn't to say that there wouldn't be some simple hack to allow memory formation in chat agents, just that there's at least one advance we need besides simple scale.

[1] As in not subliminal, not anything to do with philosophical notions of qualia.