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I would say these are two distinct use cases - one is the assistant that remembers my preferences. The other use case is the clean intelligent blackbox that knows nothing about previous sessions and I can manage the context in fine detail. Both are useful, but for very different problems.

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I'd imagine 99% of ChatGPT users see the app as the former. And then the rest know how to turn the memory off manually.

Either way, I think memory can be especially sneakily bad when trying to get creative outputs. If I have had multiple separate chats about a theme I'm exploring, I definitely don't want the model to have any sort of summary from those in context if I want a new angle on the whole thing. The opposite: I'd rather have 'random' topics only tangentially related, in order to add some sort of entropy in the outout.

Good point. I almost wish for an anonymous mode with chat history.

Would that just be the ability to chat without making new memories while using existing memories?

In chatgpt at least if you start a temporary chat it does not have access to memories.

Well you're in luck! They have that feature and talk about it in the article

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