OpenAI has expanded ChatGPT’s existing ability to remember more information about you.
On Thursday, the AI company announced via X that “ChatGPT can now reference all of your past chats to provide more personalized responses.” There was already a memory setting that, when toggled on, enabled ChatGPT to remember saved memories and reference them in conversations. But now ChatGPT can remember even more. “In addition to the saved memories that were there before, it can now reference your past chats to deliver responses that feel noticeably more relevant and useful,” OpenAI explained in the X thread.
So, even if users haven’t explicitly asked ChatGPT to remember information, it can now “reference past conversations automatically.”
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased the announcement this morning, saying on X, “a few times a year [I] wake up early and can’t fall back asleep because we are launching a new feature [I]’ve been so excited about for so long. [T]oday is one of those days!” This tease naturally had AI enthusiasts in a tizzy, anticipating big ChatGPT news about o3, o4-mini, or something equally significant. But no, Altman was just really excited about adding more memory to ChatGPT.
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In February, Google rolled out a feature for Gemini that can similarly recall and reference past conversations. And with Google hosting the Google Cloud Next cloud computing conference this week, a steady drip of Gemini AI news has been released.
If the idea of ChatGPT referencing even more personal information from past conversations is off-putting, OpenAI also announced two new chat settings to control this feature. Users can already turn off “Reference saved memories,” which means disabling references to “key facts about, like, your name or preferences,” according to an OpenAI spokesperson.
Turning off “Reference chat history” disables ChatGPT’s ability to “draw context from past conversations to adapt to your tone, goals, interests, or other recurring topics,” the spokesperson explained. The chat history data relating to this setting is not explicitly “stored or shown in settings the way saved memories are,” the spokesperson added.
This means it won’t reference past conversations to personalize future chats, but your chats are still stored in your chat history. To go completely anonymous, there’s a Temporary Chat feature — a kind of incognito mode where conversations aren’t stored in chat history and don’t contribute to what ChatGPT remembers about you.
ChatGPT’s improved memory is available to ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users starting today, with availability for Team, Enterprise, and Edu subscriptions coming in a few weeks. The memory feature is not available in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein.
