ChatGPT Memory

Hey — It’s Hussein 👋

I know it’s been a while, sorry for the hiatus. Between summer schedules, my work at Arta Finance, and the growth of my San Diego startup community and platform, Startup Beach, I haven’t been able to make enough time to focus on writing.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back into a more regular cadence and send you more AI insights soon.

Today, I wanted to focus on ChatGPT’s Memory feature and how you can take full advantage of this feature.

Before we begin, thank you to our sponsor:

If you have ever watched Inside Out or Inside Out 2 by Pixar, think of ChatGPT Memories as the same thing as the Inside Out Memories. While in the movie, these memories are often videos, in Chat GPT’s case (for now at least), they are all text-based.

If you didn’t watch the movies, think of ChatGPT Memories as things ChatGPT remembers from your previous conversations.

In a way, you can think of this as ChatGPT creating its own Custom Instructions, so you don’t have to.

ChatGPT Memory is designed in a way to remember things that will increase efficiency in it’s responses to you or how you interact with it (no more repeating yourself over and over or having to re-explain the current projects you are working on).

Some examples of what ChatGPT Memory will try to remember:

1. Professional and project details - it keeps track of projects and tasks you mention working on. For example, for me, it remembers that I am currently building a portfolio builder for Arta, that I am working on Startup Beach, and that I am coaching my son’s soccer team and am building a practice plan.

2. Challenges and decisions - it will remember what challenges you are currently facing and decisions you may have mentioned in your chats. For example, if you are struggling to complete a piece of code, it may remember details of this to help you with it in the future.

3. Your communication style - it will remember how you like to communicate with it and how you like content written. For example, it knows if you prefer short sentences or long ones, if you like to explain things in detail or prefer quick summaries.

4. Your tone and language - it will try to match the tone and language you are using. i.e. casual, professional, Yoda mode, etc.

5. Follow-ups - this one was surprising, but if you mention that you want to look into something in the future but want to focus on something else for now, it will remember this and in a future conversation when on the same topic, it will remind you of you previous chat.

6. Goals - any personal or work-related goals you mention will be stored in memory. Similarly if you mention a vision for something or a long-term goal it will also remember that.

7. Tools you use - if you ask about specific tools, it will remember that.

8. Tech stack - if you ask about preferred libraries and languages, it will remember it.

9. Audience and market - if you mention a business with a specific audience or target market, it will remember it so the next time you ask about marketing, content or product features it will tailor the response to your audience.

10. Business models - finally if you mention a business model for your startup or business it will remember what it is. For example, if you run a subscription business, it will start giving you answers that work for that business model.

You can access ChatGPT’s memory by going through Settings and then Personalization (tap on Manage from here), or you can ask ChatGPT what it knows about you.

From the settings screen, you can only delete memories if they are no longer relevant or were wrong to begin with.

If you go the chat route, you can actually ask ChatGPT to make corrections to an old memory, you can also ask it to delete one if you want it to forget it.

An increase in hallucinations, unfortunately.

If you chat with ChatGPT regarding something that is in memory but the memory may not be complete, ChatGPT will do its best to fill in the blanks.

In a creative setting, this may be ok. But when dealing with facts and figures this becomes very problematic so please pe careful with this.

One thing I found that helps is when I review my list of memories, if the memory includes details about a project that are too detailed (but not complete) I delete them and sometimes ask ChatGPT to replace them with a list that I provide.

Again, you have two options.

First, in your prompt, you can ask it to not remember the conversation.

Second, you can turn on the Temporary Chat feature, which will prevent ChatGPT from remembering the conversation.

To access Temporary Chat, tap on the ChatGPT menu (where you can change models) and the choose Temporary Chat which is the last option at the bottom.

Yes! We don’t know exactly how much memory you have, and the limit has been raised before. When you get close to running out of memory, you’ll see a usage percentage in the manage memory area.

No. Not yet. Not for paid plans or team plans or enterprise plans.

I’ll keep you posted when this changes.

That’s all for now.

Until next time!
— Hussein ✌️

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