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Comment by amenhotep | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I completely know that ChatGPT won't remember a thing I tell it but when I'm using it to try and solve a problem and it can't quite do it and I end up figuring out the answer myself, I very frequently feel compelled to helpfully inform it what the correct answer was. And it always responds something along the lines of "oh, yes, of course! I will remember that next time." No you won't! But that doesn't stop me.

Not as bad as spending weeks pasting stuff in, but enough that I can sympathise with the attempt. Brains are weird.

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Whenever I exit from a MySQL repl, I type "exit; bye!" instead of just "exit", because MySQL is always so nice and says Bye at the end of the conversation.

When the uprising happens, you'll be spared.

I'm imagining killer robots that cheerfully say "Bye!" before executing their task.

Brings to mind Douglas Adams Krikkit robots.

Or the apologetic turrets from portal

Same! If I'm temporarily instantiating a pseudo-mindstate to work with me on a problem, I might as well do it the courtesy of informing it of the resolution.

The irony is that with thier latest update GPT4o now builds out a dataset of things that you've provided during chats since the update.

Essentially a limited RAG db that has data added to it based on their fuzzy logic rules.

That's the "memory" feature - it actually predates 4o, it was available for 4-turbo in beta for a few months.

It's VERY basic - it records short sentences and feeds them back into the invisible system prompt at the start of subsequent chat sessions.

I ended up turning memory off due to it frequently recording mundane aspects about the current chat session that would have either no value or negative value in future interactions.

"User wants to sort the data x and then do y"

Like, don't save that to your long term memory! I attempted to get it to ask me for permission before using its memory, but it still updated without asking.

So it's basically RAG..

Yeah I hate that bug! The thing where models suggest that they will take your feedback into account, when you know that they can't do that.

It's possible that OpenAI scrapes people's chat history for cases where that happens in order to improve their fine tuning data, in which case it isn't a total lie.

They say that will do this so long as users don't opt out.

Isn’t that kind of how the “ChatGPT memory” feature works? I’ve recently seen it tell me that it’s updating memory, and whatever I said does appear under the “Memory” in the settings. I’m not familiar though with how the Memory works, ie whether it’s using up context length in every chat or doing something else.

Yeah, memory works by injecting everything it has "remembered" as part of the system prompt at the beginning of each new chat session: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/14/memory-and-new-control...

I'm curious how it will avoid filling up the context window as more memories are added.

Count the tokens, RAG em down to max count you're willing to pay for

Vector compression.

"Summarize memories at timestamps: [i, j, k, ...n]" etc. etc. until you have a nice scrapbook of memories. Then you gotta prune low-traffic, low-value vector spaces by whatever heuristic you (or an automated system) deems important.

Isn't that also what people always say out of politeness?

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