A test run will allow the chatbot to remember certain user details indefinitely. The next time you tell ChatGPT you’re allergic to avocados or prefer all your notes from a work meeting to be formatted with bullet points , the chatbot could remember those details indefinitely, according to Bloomberg .
OpenAI is testing an option for users to ask the chatbot to retain certain information from one conversation to another, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence startup, said in a blog post.
Furthermore, ChatGPT will be able to automatically determine which information from user conversations should be retained. OpenAI will initially make the features available to hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users, both free and paid, with plans to review feedback before rolling them out more widely, the company told Bloomberg News .
The new memory feature marks OpenAI’s latest attempt to make its best-known product more useful and personalized for its 100 million weekly users, as the startup faces a growing list of competitors offering chatbots comparable.
While building a more detailed history for each user might raise new privacy concerns, it’s also an effective way for Internet companies to personalize each person’s experience and build customer loyalty. OpenAI previously offered users the ability to provide custom instructions for ChatGPT to avoid repeating preferences in every chat, but the new feature goes beyond that.
Joanne Jang, OpenAI’s product lead that focuses on how its AI models respond to humans, demonstrated the potential of ChatGPT’s new ability by feeding it three different facts, one in each of three different conversations. Jang wrote that she has a child named Lina who will be five soon, that Lina loves jellyfish, and that Lina likes the color pink.
In a fourth conversation, Jang simply asked ChatGPT to create a birthday card for his daughter. The chatbot used OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 image generator to create a pink book with pink jellyfish on it that read: «Happy birthday Lina — today is your fifth birthday.»
OpenAI will notify people if they have access to the feature, the company said. Those with this feature will be able to delete individual details that have been saved – either by deleting everything at once or choosing to disable the option entirely.
Users can also ask ChatGPT what it remembers to get a summary of any information it has retained over time.
ChatGPT already instructs users not to give it sensitive personal information, such as passwords or passport numbers, and the new feature is designed to refuse to save such data, Jang said.
Information saved in ChatGPT’s memory from user conversations will be treated as regular conversational data, meaning it can be used to train the company’s AI models, unless users have opted to keep their conversations out of training .
Liam Fedus, a research scientist working on ChatGPT and GPT-4, one of the AI models powering the chatbot, said the memory ability will be able to store several thousand tokens of written information.
OpenAI software breaks words into chunks of multiple letters, known as tokens, to process the text. To put things into context: 2,048 tokens is roughly equivalent to 1,500 words, which is about three times the length of this article.
