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In February, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Memory, a feature that gives the chatbot the ability to remember past chats.
However, with speculation rising over the release of GPT-5 — and then the actual release of GPT-4o in May — Memory has largely gone under the radar, even while it completely revamps ChatGPT’s capabilities as an assistant.
At a minimum, it reduces the amount of context you need to provide in each prompt, and at most, it adds a whole new level of personalization that simply wasn’t present before.
While it’s not quite as high profile as the release of the GPT Store or a multimodal language model, it has given ChatGPT a persistent memory, which can’t be underestimated.
Key Takeaways
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT Memory gives the chatbot the ability to remember past interactions for improved assistance.
- Despite its potential, ChatGPT Memory has been overshadowed by the release of GPT-4o and speculation about GPT-5.
- Users can influence ChatGPT’s responses by telling it to remember preferences, making future conversations more relevant and tailored.
- The feature reduces the need to repeat information in prompts and personalizes responses based on user preferences and past interactions.
- While a great feature, you will need to consider whether there are privacy concerns, as it records user inputs to help improve OpenAI’s models.
Why You Should Turn on ChatGPT Memory
In a promotional blog post, OpenAI notes that “remembering things you discuss across all chats saves you from having to repeat information and makes future conversations more helpful.”
Just simply tell ChatGPT to remember something from your conversation, and it will record this preference going forward. This provides the user with a medium to influence and finetune the type of responses they receive going forward.
For example, if you are using ChatGPT to create content, you can provide information about your target audience and even stylistic preferences, such as tone, to shape the output.
That’s useful for one prompt — but now that ChatGPT knows what you work on, all future prompts are influenced by what it already knows.
Outside of work, you get more relevant recommendations. If you talk a lot to ChatGPT about what films you like, then when you are seeking films to watch, it already knows a lot about your preferences, rather than each conversation starting as a blank slate.
Or if ChatGPT knows you are a coder working within, let’s say, e-commerce, it will already know the context of your work and apply that knowledge to the tasks you are offloading to ChatGPT.
What are the Use Cases for ChatGPT Memory?
ChatGPT memory can support a wide range of use cases. Some of these are as follows:
- Personal assistant – Record information about yourself to build a personal assistant that knows information about you and your preferences.
- Record preferences – Create a record of your tone, voice and format preferences.
- Create a historical knowledge base – Jot down information about past events and use ChatGPT as a research assistant to ask questions about them.
- Content recommendations – Use memory to generate relevant recommendations on films and books.
- Coding – Tell ChatGPT your preferred programming language and coding frameworks so you don’t need to enter it manually with each prompt.
How Does ChatGPT Memory Work?
ChatGPT Memory is available to ChatGPT Plus Subscribers, and will be added for Enterprise and Teams users as part of a wider rollout.
To use it, all you need to do is enter a written prompt telling it to “remember” a particular preference. You can also ask it for what information it remembers about you, or to tell it to forget information that you’ve told it in the past.
The more you use the feature and tell ChatGPT to remember things, the more it will remember and improve over time.
Users can also interact with ChatGPT memory in Settings. In Settings you can view and delete specific memories by going to Settings > Personalization > Memory. You can also turn off the feature entirely.
It is important to note that OpenAI memories may be processed to help improve OpenAI’s models, so if you don’t want to share your data in this manner you may want to deactivate the feature altogether or just use temporary chats.
What are the Dangers of Using ChatGPT Memory?
ChatGPT memory doesn’t have any dangers per se, but it may introduce some privacy concerns. For instance, not all users will be comfortable that the feature uses memory to help train OpenAI’s models.
These concerns may be amplified further by the fact that ChatGPT will also add information to its memory from chats independently.
For this reason, users should be aware that their inputs may be recorded when using ChatGPT memory. If they can’t accept this risk, the best course of action is to keep the feature deactivated.
Ultimately, whether the feature is welcome or not will likely depend on the user’s preferences. While some users may find having a more personalized chatbot is worth the privacy trade-offs, for some it may be a step too far.
The Bottom Line
The introduction of persistent memory to ChatGPT revamps the chatbot’s capabilities and gives users much more control over the type of output generated.
The future of language models lies within personalization, and memory provides a simple solution for users to customize ChatGPT’s outputs. We lightly recommend trying it out and seeing if it makes the world’s most dominant chatbot a little bit smarter for you.
