Introducing ChatGPT’s Personalized Experience: Enhanced with Memory-Based Response Tailoring

OpenAI has been rolling out new features for ChatGPT at a steady rate, but most of them are based on the GPT-4 language model and limited to the paid ChatGPT Plus subscription. There’s finally something coming to both free and paid users: a new “memory” function that will retain some information for all your chats.

ChatGPT already supports custom instructions , which you can fill out with data or instructions that can be used in any future conversations without typing them every time. OpenAI is now rolling out a similar feature, simply called “memory,” which works in the background automatically. If you have access to custom GPTs through ChatGPT Plus, each GPT will have its own distinct memory.

OpenAI said in a blog post, “We’re testing memory with ChatGPT. Remembering things you discuss across all chats saves you from having to repeat information and makes future conversations more helpful. You’re in control of ChatGPT’s memory. You can explicitly tell it to remember something, ask it what it remembers, and tell it to forget conversationally or through settings. You can also turn it off entirely.”

OpenAI

The idea is that ChatGPT will save details from your conversation, like people you mention, your interests, how you prefer summaries, and other similar data. One example from OpenAI is that if you tell ChatGPT “you prefer meeting notes to have headlines, bullets and action items summarized at the bottom,” then ChatGPT will remember that and summarize future meetings in the same way. OpenAI said “sensitive information, like your health details” shouldn’t be saved as memories, but based on how reliable ChatGPT can be with regular information processing , there’s no telling if that works or not.

You can turn off the memory feature at any time in ChatGPT by opening the settings page and navigating to Personalization > Memory. You can also delete individual data items that ChatGPT has collected, or just use temporary chats for discussions that you don’t want saved or analyzed in any way.

The memory feature is rolling out to “a small portion of ChatGPT free and Plus users this week.” There’s no official timeline for a wide rollout just yet.

Source: OpenAI