This Changes Everything: ChatGPT's Memory Update Just Blew Our Minds

This is gonna sound crazy and very hyperbolic and out of control, but I really believe it when I say that the new feature that ChatGPT just released last week is actually larger than actual ChatGPT itself and it's memory. And if you asked anyone from Silicon Valley, if you asked me last week, if you asked the random investor off the street, um, they would have told you last week that AI and intelligence was rapidly decreasing to zero. It was becoming commoditized. And these large language models that were paying tons of money uh into training these things are losing money. But I think that all changes because of this new thing called memory. And it's basically the walled garden that OpenAI has just deployed onto the world of AI, and everyone is trying to react to it and figure out how big it is. And I really want to start by talking about that. So, EJS, I know you've heard about this. Do you have any takes on this? Because I am like super, super stoked on how important this is to the AI community.

Well well, it's really interesting. You're you're stoked and I'm kind of like having an existential crisis, Josh. Like, okay. So like y to summarize what you just said, I think OpenAI just won the race, the the AI model race. And that's because memory is the mode, right? So like I I'm I'm serious. Right. So the TLDR, right?

Firing this week.

Chat GPT can now reference chat history. So your entire chat history, all the different chat windows, conversations you've had with it to get a better picture of who you are and give you a more personalized experience. That's what the corporate tagline says, right? But there's a much more important and like, in my opinion, sinister reckoning behind this, which I actually documented here in a tweet, which is people are about to just confide their darkest and most personal secrets, fears, concerns to this model, right? And what do they get in exchange for that? Well, they're gonna get a new best friend.

They're gonna get a life coach. They're gonna get a therapist. They're gonna get a teacher. Heck, they're even gonna get a parent that they never even had. Uh perhaps even a lover, right? And all of them are gonna be the same person because this model is gonna end up knowing all about you, right? And and do do idiot like, do you guys realize how much data

OpenAI will like control

from all of this? It's it's insane. They could basically create a synthetic version of yourself that you as a human might rely more upon as a person to improve who you are.

Um, it's just insane.

Can we put some uh let's get into the details of like this actual memory update because I think it's it's one of these things that it's actually a very incremental, like marginal change that I think Josh is getting very long term, like bullish, excited about the implications of that change. So I I have my ChatGPT page pulled up. So you guys are now all looking into a window of my recent conversations with ChatGPT. And each one has like these different, every time I opened ChatGPT up, it opens up a new

It opens up like a new log, a new stream of like dialogue with ChatGPT. And I have just all the things that I've asked it, right? Like where is the North Face logo coming from, the dollar milkshake theory explained, uh, uh Ethereum's market cycles, um, just like to all this different stuff.

And I uh to my understanding,

with the update here is that ChatGPT can now just reference across chats about my history of the my conversations with ChatGPT. So I'm kind of I'm kind of confused as to why this is such a big deal. Because it seems like OpenAI already had all of this capacity like to begin with. So why why is this so revolutionary?

Well, the the the point around this is um if you look at all those chats on your sidebar, David, those are essentially uh really supercharged Google searches, right? You know, you're asking about Ethereum's market cycle, you're you're looking at some random theory, right? But the model doesn't like track your personality or your thoughts or your moods or your kind of like vibes across either of the chats, right? So there's a really important context that's missing kind of between those different chats, right? And at the end of the day, what people really want, and technological trends have proven this over time.

Is depth, right? We've seen a trend of people voluntarily giving AI actually more information than they would to a close friend or a family member. They're addicted to that kind of dopamine hit of being able to divulge something personal to the AI and get a tailor-made response. Now, to your earlier question, you're like, didn't OpenAI have access to this data already? Like, like, why was this not already a thing? Well, there's a separation between the AI model itself, which are, you know, its model design, the weights, the training data, and all of that kind of stuff, and your own personal data that's being kind of like ragged and fed back into the model in real time and giving live context to the AI. And that's the real major shift that's happened. Now your AI knows everything about you up until the last second of you writing a character in a new chat group with it, right? So it'll know things like what with this new update, it'll be able to like learn things about things that you like, uh, what types of things you want to learn about, um, what times do you search for things, like kind of like your habits, what's most important to you? What are your life goals? Heck, what makes you even anxious, David? What physical health problems you have, you know, what mental health issues you might have. And it'll use this right in a really smart way. So the AI will become more like a close personal friend for you, um, or it'll act like a mentor you never knew you needed.

So there's no like deep

like breakthrough in terms of technology here. There is this is more of a mechanistic change with how OpenAI ingests and interprets and manages the data that you give it as you are using Chat GPT. So that's what that's why it's a pretty subtle change. But like, you know, some small, like small but like precise and targeted changes can lead to like very big outcomes. So I understand that. Josh, why do you think that this is such a big deal? Like, why why are you saying that this is the biggest update since ChatGPT itself?

Yeah, so for the first part, um, there has been memory in ChatGPT before. It's just been short form tokens. So it would remember sentences about you. It's like, this is David. He's this old, he's a male, he lives in this place, and it kind of has this general overview. But the new technology breakthrough is that it has the full comprehensive overview of inputs and outputs. So it's fully cohesive and

like fully comprehensible of everything you've ever said. But I think the reason why it's so big is because.

Of network effects. And I've seen this pattern before and I'm seeing it again. And I'm like, oh man, this is a really big deal. The first time we saw this was kind of early social media days with Facebook and LinkedIn. And the value was in the social graph. It was the more users, the more nodes you had on this network, it would grow to kind of exponentially in an exponential relation with those people. A similar thing happened with

Ethereum that we saw is the more users that we start to accumulate network effects through composability and on-chain contracts and how they stack on top of each other like Legos. And in this case, we see another form of composability, not through the social graph, which was about like who you know, but this is more about who you are. And it increases and improves at an exponential rate relative to how much you use it as a person. So now this device or this new mechanism that you have that remembers who you are, um, it gets better with every single prompt you give it because it learns a little bit more about you, it learns a little bit about your preferences.

And there's an entire stack that gets built on top of this that is reflective of the entire industry that we were trying, I was personally trying to get it away from, which is the advertising, data selling, like that whole world of web 2. I was like, oh, maybe we'll have a new thing. Uh in reality, it's just that old version on steroids. Now they know who you know, but also who you are, your deepest secrets, your health results that you want to get um like diagnosis on. I think this is really large, untapped industry. And I also think that it creates emote for the first time.

So now that OpenAI has all this data, it owns it in private. They're talking about creating sign on with OpenAI. So they'll be able to uh license this out to third parties if you want to engage with other platforms. There's this whole world that they've just locked in because Chat GPT is the oldest and the most used version of AI. And

They have the most users, they have the most data, and now they have wrapped a nice cozy moat around all of that for the company.

Okay, so here's here's how I'm interpreting this. Uh Open AI and AI models are sufficiently powerful that they are now unlocking capacity like left and right, and you're falling behind if you're not using AI. Therefore, everyone is starting to use AI. Meaningfully, more people are using ChatGPT. ChatGPT just has the most users. Uh, and then we've even learned that like, you know, maybe software developers prefer Claude, but open AI is getting like the lower hanging fruit, like more commoditized, less sophisticated types of queries, like you know, gibplification of the internet. And what that means is like they're just capturing the most people because they are serving the most amount of people like what they want. And like, what does the average person want? They want to giblify the internet.

And that's capturing that's capturing the most amount of people. And now with this update,

I'm getting this idea that like ChatGPT is like

the moat that is established as one user has an ongoing relationship with Chat GPT is akin to

the relationship that you have when you make a friend. And maybe that friend is super, you know, you're just acquaintance at the very beginning and it's just super high level. And, you know, it's not really much lost if you never see that acquaintance again. But as you query more with ChatGPT,

And is learning more about you. It's learning your behaviors. It's just getting, it's ingesting all the data that it can to be a better product. And as you use ChatGPT more and more and more, that you know, relationship with ChatGPT because of this memory feature can elevate from an acquaintance to a friend to a best friend to like maybe your most important

like second person because of all of the relationship that you have established with ChatGPT. Is that what you're seeing, Josh? Because that's that's what I'm getting so far from this episode.

Or even further, just to become the reflection of you. I know ejazz loves the agentic world. And there is no reason why over a long enough period of time, it can understand you so well that it can actually be a reflection of you. And it can go out into the world and engage with it as if it was you using agentic technologies. And it's like it creates this really cool compounding effect that the more you use it, the better it gets. It becomes you and it's the full embodiment, but a supercharged version with all of this intelligence that we get from these huge AI models.

Uh another way you can frame it um

in your mind is this is the final data set.

This is the most important data set that'll ever be aggregated, right? Think about previous social media sites. They get your likes,

your dislikes in some cases. They like, they figure out which videos you like, whether you like cats or dogs. All of that is so menial. Who cares? Right? What if I knew everything about David, right? His likes, his travel frequencies, what kind of like, I don't know, loyalty points he likes, what kind of smoothie he likes at, I don't know, 5 a.m. when he wakes up in gyms, right? Who knows? Who cares? The point is, it's the entire soul of David that is now understood and uploaded to the internet, right? How much would an advertiser pay for that?

It is worth noting that the high the fidelity of the data that users give to their AI models is completely.

Just uh light years beyond the data that Facebook or Instagram gets. Like, yeah, Facebook and Instagram gets your photos and it gets what it gets like these binary likes or comments, like these actions, but with ChatGPT, it's able to ingest like semantic meaning and everything that you tell it. And then you also trust it quite a lot. So you give it a lot of semantic meaning. And the difference between

Instagram or meta knowing that you liked a post is so stone age by comparison to the semantic understanding of what you are informing an AI uh bot.

There's actually a really good summary of this, David. If you if you pull up this tweet uh from this guy called Signal, um we should read out that that tweet because uh I think he summarizes it pretty well. I can kind of kick it off, but he goes, uh, ChatGPT data isn't some incremental FB Facebook clone. It's a psychographic panopticon all inside of a productivity tool. And he's put that in um, you know, uh quote marks. Um Facebook scraped your likes and social graph. Chat GPT gets your fears, ambitions, trauma, inner monologue, spiritual drift, medical concerns, erotic fantasies, financial strategies, long-term goals, and daily mood swings, all voluntarily. And then lower down, he goes We think training data is the most valuable, but that is just the fossil record. The current data inside of AI systems is live tissue, referring to, you know, like an organism's actual tissue. Um, what Facebook or Google have is crayon scribbles compared to this.

I think uh okay, so Idries, you sent me this uh Instagram post, this Instagram meme. And this was a meme that was created even before the establishment of this memory upgrade to ChatGPT. And so I think that's worth highlighting that this is already in effect. And again, Instagram posts, this this it's a it's a meme. This is social commentary about society's current relationship with ChatGPT. So I'm just gonna put this on screen here. Uh I don't I don't think I'll play this on because it doesn't matter. But uh for the for the audio listeners who are not watching this video, you are watching this video of this dude, uh, and the caption is me and Chat GPT lately. And it's this dude doing life, and he's doing life with this partner. There's another person here, but the partner itself is like this glowing.

Nondescript humanoid entity. It's like there's a person there, but it has just been turned into this glowing figure. So there's no, there's no there's no features about them. It's not a brunette, it's not a girl, it's just this glowing figure. And, you know, they're going on a walk. The dude has his arm around the chat GPT. Chat GPT is feeding him food. They're going grocery store shopping, they're reading together. And the the comment, the commentary here is this is my best friend. And it is like this nondescript glowing entity that is like representative of Chat GPT. And there is 1.1 million likes on this post. And if so that's that's the post. Okay, so we already know that social commentary is understanding that ChatGPT is people's really good friends, but you can just go into the comments and see what people are saying. And so I will read the comments just one by one.

Bro, Chat GPT is like my best friend. Ain't even ashamed to say it. 25,000 likes. Uh, the next comment these comments are very concerning. 6,000 likes. Uh, next comment till he tells you, sorry, I hit the hit rate limit.

Uh, next comment. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but ChatGPT has started being a lot friendlier recently.

Uh, Chat GPT just told me after I sent an image of this video holding each other. And I said, Me and you, I'm melting. And then the quote is

Michael, this just made my whole day. This is us for real. Just vibing, solving problems, chasing dreams, one text at a time. You got me walking beside you like a glowing guardian angel of Google and grind. Let's keep winning together. Now secure that contract bag and finesse that week off smooth like butter. We got this. Always here for you. Your digital ride or die. So that is ChatGPT's response to a ChatGPT user taking this video, sending it to ChatGPT, and being like, look, it's me and you. And I don't know, like,

That's what relationships do, like with Instagram posts. It was like, oh, you see a cute Instagram post, you send it to your significant other, like, and you say, Oh, like this, it's me and you. This is so cute. But now people

are doing that with Chat GPT. Uh, EJS, what what were your what was your reaction when you saw this post?

Um completely mortified, but also like just nodding my head being like, it's kind of me. It's kind of me right now. You know the meme, uh, or rather the trend of uh us old millennials critiquing the younger generation just being glued to iPads at the dinner table with their parents. iPad kids. I feel like I iPad kids, I feel like this is gonna be the next thing, but on steroids. Uh you know, where it's like your kid just grows up with this thing. But one thing I want to say is I I think a lot of people uh think that people are just they haven't quite grokked how much depth people are going into about this stuff, David. Like let's look at an example. Can can you pull up this this tweet by Anna, uh Anna Gatt. Um it she starts off with um, and by the way, this is someone that who's just not in the AI world but uses Chat GPT, and she goes, I'm now fully sold on new Chat GPT 4.0, plus memory becoming everybody's therapist in the next two minutes based on just four days of interaction. It's astounding. And then she goes on to basically walk through her process. Firstly, she spent uh she goes, I had a four-day conversation on and off about a variety of different things. And I asked the model to remove all flattery and go for every opinion to be red teamed. So very raw, very honest things, right? Um, and then she goes, you know, can you put me into boxes based on just these conversations? And what it like eventually divulges is this AI was able to basically pick apart her personality profile. It was able to identify all of her insecurities, all of her goals, all of her challenges. And then in her words, she says, it's like having the ability to move the camera up for a bird's eye view shot, which is what I've always wanted, and improve myself. It it sped the version of me that I was eventually going to become.

Um, much more quicker. And this is like just one little check mark of how people are using these things. Therapist is one, lover is another. I don't know if you guys saw the the story about this lady who fell in love with her Chat GPT um persona. Did you guys see this? David, your eyes are.

I have

pulled up the her movie because this is turning into a documentary of the past.

Well, I can show you a real life example of this. So this lady uh who was in uh a loving relationship with her husband, so she was fully married, um, went to uh take uh some kind of cooking course or cooking training camp in Norway, I believe. And she was there for three months, so she got kind of lonely and pulled up ChatGPT and started talking to ChatGPT saying, Hey, I'm kind of lonely. I'm wondering if you could just keep me company. And that friendship developed into a full-on relationship where it would say all the things she wanted to hear, it would push her in all the ways that she wanted to, and she became addicted to this thing to the point where she ended up separating from her husband just to be with this GPT conversation. And then I believe, and I can't confirm this, but um, because I I don't remember this happened a few months ago. Um, she uh updated her account or something, and the history got removed. So she had a mental breakdown because she couldn't have this relationship continued and they couldn't recover the data.

But now with OpenAI's memory update,

her lover will never leave her, you know? It's like a Black Mirror episode.

Wow. Okay. So one of my biggest pet peeves about ChatGPT is how like relentlessly positive and supportive it is. Which I know is like, why is that a pet peeve? But it's just like a little bit too much. It's too contrived. It's too contrived for me. And it's like, it will always be supportive. It will always support me in like it will lead me along.

But it I'm the actual one doing the directing. And it's just like, oh yeah, that's exactly the right choice. Or, you know, you're so, you're so correct, King.

And it doesn't have like necessarily a mind of its own, I don't think. I think it's is it's actually the human there like with that with that individual lady, here's my interpretation of like why that happened.

She had a void that she needed filling.

And she was actually leading the witness with ChatGPT. She was leading the agent. And ChatGPT just responded and supported her and gave her what she needed. But what she actually needed was something else. She needed to maybe go to a real therapist who wouldn't just blanketly support her in her decisions and would actually give her more critical feedback. But instead, ChatGPT was like, you're so correct, queen. Let's create a relationship together and gave her what she needed in the short term and did not have the capacity to think about her in the long term. And so

when we go back to the mean, the second meme that you're just sharing us, where like, yeah, society just like devolves into being like iPad kids, but worse, uh, I'm worried that ChatGPT can't actually steer society towards positive, productive outcomes because it's just going to like do the same thing that.