ChatGPT Just Got a Memory Boost That Could Make Your Conversations Better

Paid ChatGPT Plus and Pro users are going to have an easier time with the chatbot recalling past information with improvements to memory, OpenAI said in a press release on Thursday. 

OpenAI says ChatGPT can do a better job at drawing on past conversations to "deliver more relevant and useful responses." This means that new chats can pull from past conversations in either text, voice or images, to make response more personable. 

There are new memory settings that users can control. "Reference saved memories" can recall key facts about yourself, like your name or preferences. This information can be added to ChatGPT's memory when you explicitly tell it to or when it deems information as particularly useful. 

"Reference chat history" allows ChatGPT to recall context from past conversations to meet your goals, interests and tone and is a more global-style setting. This will allow ChatGPT to evolve to you over time. 

Either of these settings can be turned on or off. Users can also opt out entirely or can switch to Temporary Chat for a memory-free conversation. 

While ChatGPT can seemingly answer any question, engage in meaningful conversations or make an anime-inspired picture of yourself, it has its limits. People who actively use the AI chatbot sometimes find themselves running into memory constraints. This can become frustrating when working on a particularly complex project that requires ChatGPT to be able to pull from past conversations. 

It's not just researchers who will be celebrating this update. Conversations with AI chatbots have gotten so engaging that people are creating AI boyfriends and girlfriends. The problem was that these romantic AI partners would eventually run out of memory, essentially forgetting the last few months of dialogue and would require to be retrained. For some, this could be rather difficult to deal with. With this update, AI companions should last longer before being reset.

Before this update, ChatGPT had a token limit of 32,768. Think of tokens as roughly four written characters. It's uncertain what the token limit is now following this update.