ChatGPT Wants to Remember Everything - OpenAI's Sam Altman Has a Shocking New Goal

It might not be an exaggeration to say that we all use ChatGPT at least once a day for something or the other. This is because AI has become super useful in the past few years. Especially bots like ChatGPT by OpenAI that can create essays, solve many problems and even write poetry.

But according to Sam Altman, who is chief executive of OpenAI, the next giant jump in AI will not come from smarter thinking. Instead, it will come from memory. Altman believes that the ability for AI to remember everything about a person over time will transform how these systems interact with people, turning them from reactive tools into proactive digital companions with extremely detailed personalisation. This massive change may affect both technology and society, and it opens up big issues about privacy and the future of human AI relationships.

If you have noticed, while talking to ChatGPT, it can remember and recall your previous conversations up to a limit, you can also store some things in memory that can be reused again and again. But it is very limited.

ChatGPT's Memory Chosen Over Reasoning

Now, in a new interview with Alex Kantrowitz, Altman said that while current AI tools are already impressive at reasoning, they lack sustained recall of what has come before. He said that today's artificial intelligence falls short because it cannot remember details about users over extended periods, such as personal preferences, past conversations, documents or habits.

Instead, each interaction begins like new, meaning the systems cannot truly learn about someone in the way humans do. Here are his viral comments:

Moreover, Altman's vision is for AI systems like ChatGPT to carry a supposed kind of lifelong memory that has personal context. So, instead of just processing prompts, an AI with memory could remember what a user has said months or even years earlier and apply that context intelligently. Here, for example, such an AI could remember your favourite hobbies, your long term writing projects or your constant problems, making anticipatory replies and personalised assistance without being prompted.

This idea of a forever memory represents a giant departure from the way most large language models work today, where the context of past interactions is limited and temporary.

The implications of this change are obviously huge. This is because a system that remembers everything could become more useful in everyday life, almost acting as a personal assistant that truly understands you. Especially because humans forget things, but these AI for sure will not.

Furthermore, business oriented uses could include managing schedules, drafting complex documents with your style in mind, or giving pointed advice. But this also creates worries about the amount of private data such systems would store and how securely it would be handled. The more an AI remembers, the more sensitive things it could get to know about you.

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Why AI Memory Should Be Handled with Great Caution

However, the idea of AI that remembers everything also comes with problems, as expected. Experts in the field say that memory in AI is more complicated than simply increasing the context window of a model. Current systems are stateless, meaning they do not truly 'remember' beyond each chat unless that information is manually fed back into the system.

Long term memory in AI, though, requires new systems that can index, retrieve and update information in ways that mirror human recall. Research efforts, such as those exploring memory augmented neural networks, show ongoing trials to add real long term memory skills to large language models, but the work is still in early stages at best.

Furthermore, there are also ethical issues here. A memory-enabled AI would hold a gigantic amount of personal data, creating problems about data protection and potential misuse. Also, data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe already put strict controls on how personal information may be stored and processed. So, putting in persistent memory into AI will require not just technical safety rules, but also legal and ethical rules that protect users while allowing innovation to go forward.