ChatGPT's new memory feature automatically saves details from your conversations to personalize future chats. It's significant because it's easier than before, but not revolutionary: you could already get persistent context through custom instructions. The update mainly automates what was already possible.
Let's talk about this new ChatGPT feature. Everybody has been tweeting about this, creating YouTube videos about this, and I actually have a take that is very different from everything else that I've seen. So is this a big deal? Yes and no. Let me explain. So, brief summary of what this does is it looks at some of your previous conversations and saves the info in there to create a memory bank that it's now going to use as context moving forward, yielding more personalized results. But why did I say yes and no? Because that would be a clear yes, right? Well, no, because that this is not really revolutionary. It's just a more user friendly way to implement this. Because up until now we had this feature, it was simply called custom instructions. And you could specify your personalized context, but you had to craft them yourself. You had to write something up, or you had to use ChatGPT to generate them, or you had to get one of my presets. Either way, you could do this. You could provide it with more personalized context, but now it's going to gather it automatically, which is a huge unlock for most users because most people don't bother with customizing the custom instructions.
