OpenAI is giving ChatGPT better memory.
The San Francisco artificial intelligence startup said Tuesday it was launching a new version of its chatbot that would remember what users said so it could use that information in future chats.
If a user mentions a daughter, Lina, who is about to turn 5, likes the color pink, and enjoys jellyfish, for example, ChatGPT can store this information and retrieve it as needed. When the same user asks the robot to “create a birthday card for my daughter,” it may generate a card with a pink jellyfish that says, “Happy 5th birthday, Lina!”
With this new technology, OpenAI continues to transform ChatGPT into an automated digital assistant that can compete with existing services like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa. Last year, the company allowed users add instructions and personal preferences, such as details about their jobs or the size of their families, which the chatbot must consider during each conversation. ChatGPT can now leverage a much broader and more detailed range of information.
“We believe the most useful assistants are those that evolve with you and keep up with you,” said Joanne Jang, an OpenAI product lead who helps oversee its memory project.
Although ChatGPT can now remember previous conversations, it can still make mistakes, just like humans. When a user asks ChatGPT to make Lina a birthday card, the chatbot can create one with a subtle typo like “Happy 5th birthday! Lina!
First, the company will provide the new technology to a limited number of users. It will be available to people who use the free version of ChatGPT, as well as those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus, a more advanced service that costs $20 a month.
OpenAI will also introduce users on Tuesday to what it calls temporary chats, during which no conversations or memories are stored.
ChatGPT has offered a limited form of memory for some time. When users chatted with the bot, their responses were based on what they said earlier in the same conversion. Now, the bot can leverage information from previous conversations.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December, for copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
The robot builds this memory by automatically identifying and storing information that could be useful in the future. “We rely on the model to decide what may or may not be relevant,” said an OpenAI research scientist, Liam Fedus, referring to the ai technology underpinning ChatGPT.
Users can tell the bot to remember something specific from their conversation, ask what is already stored in its memory, tell the chatbot to forget certain information, or turn off memory completely.
By default, OpenAI has been recording entire ChatGPT conversations and using them to train future versions of the chatbot. OpenAI said it removed personally identifiable information from conversations used to train its technology. And users can choose to completely remove their conversations from OpenAI training data.
But creating and storing a separate list of personal memories that the chatbot can mention in conversations could raise privacy concerns. The company argued that what it was doing was not much different from the way search engines and browsers store their users' Internet history.
