ChatGPT can now remember things both of you discussed to save you from having to repeat information in future chats.
Users will ultimately be the ones in control of its chatbot’s memory, OpenAI said. You can tell it to remember something specific, ask it about what it remembers, and you can ask ChatGPT to forget a piece of information. If you’re not keen on using any of these features, you can also turn them off entirely.
To do this you’ll want to head to the personalization section in ChatGPT’s settings and toggle Memory off.
A version of ChatGPT with these new memory features is being rolled out to paid-up Plus users and a small portion of ChatGPT free users. OpenAI announced that a broader roll-out will happen soon.
How it works
Memory in ChatGPT is pretty straightforward. Unless you want to opt out of the new feature, simply continue chatting as you were doing before.
During your conversations with ChatGPT, the chatbot will pick up on details it thinks should be remembered automatically. If in doubt, just ask it explicitly to remember something you want it to be able to recall in the future. OpenAI says ChatGPT’s memory will improve the more you use it.
It can remember practically anything. If you typically use ChatGPT to summarize meetings with bullet points at the top and action items at the bottom, ChatGPT will learn that this is the way you like things done and will start to present meeting summaries in this format.
If you tell ChatGPT about your child’s latest animal obsession, when you're designing a cool card for their birthday, ChatGPT might suggest creating one featuring their favorite animal.
We’re testing ChatGPT's ability to remember things you discuss to make future chats more helpful. This feature is being rolled out to a small portion of Free and Plus users, and it's easy to turn on or off. https://t.co/1Tv355oa7V pic.twitter.com/BsFinBSTbsFebruary 13, 2024
But remember, deleting a chat doesn't erase these kinds of memories. For this, you’ll have to delete each specific memory.
If you want to have a quick conversation without using these memory features use temporary chat — basically an ‘incognito’ version of ChatGPT that won’t appear in your history, will not use memory, and won’t be used to train the AI model.
ChatGPT’s new memory functions may also prove to be useful to Team and Enterprise users who use the chatbot for company purposes. Let’s say you use the chatbot to reply to emails in a specific format and corporate tone of voice, using memory you won’t need to re-explain this every time an email comes in.
