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patrickmcnamara | 1 month ago

I really think this memory thing is overstated on Hacker News. This is not something that is hard to move at all. It's not a moat. I don't think most users even know memory exist outside of a single conversation.

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jorl17|1 month ago

Every single one of my non-techie friends who use ChatGPT rely heavily on memory. Whenever they try something different to it, they get very annoyed that it just doesn't "get them" or "know them".

Perhaps it'll be easy to migrate memories indeed (I mean there are already plugins that sort of claim to do it, and it doesn't seem very hard), but it certainly is a very differentiating feature at the moment.

I also use ChatGPT as my daily "chat LLM" because of memory, and, especially, because of the voice chat, which I still feel is miles better than any competition. People say Gemini voice chat is great, but I find it terrible. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an A/B test.

shaftway|1 month ago

This feels like an area Google would have an advantage though. Look at all of the data about you that Google has and it could mine across Wallet, Maps, Photos, Calendar, GMail, and more. Google knows my name, address, drivers license, passport, where I work, when I'm home, what I'm doing tomorrow, when I'm going on vacation and where I'm going, and whole litany of other information.

The real challenge for Google is going to be using that information in a privacy-conscious way. If this was 2006 and Google was still a darling child that could do no wrong, they'd have already integrated all of that information and tried to sell it as a "magical experience". Now all it'll take is one public slip-up and the media will pounce. I bet this is why they haven't done that integration yet.

zephyrthenoble|1 month ago

On the other side of the test, I don't know a non-tech person who uses ChatGPT at all.

bsimpson|1 month ago

I dislike that it has a memory.

It creeps me out when a past session poisons a current one.

transcriptase|1 month ago

Exactly. I went through a phase of playing around with ESP32s and now it tries to steer every prompt about anything technology or electronics related back to how it can be used in conjunction with a microcontroller, regardless of how little sense it makes.

fluidcruft|1 month ago

I agree. For me it's annoying because everything it generates is too tailored to the first stuff I started chatting with it about. I have multiple responsibilities and I haven't been able to get it to compartmentalize. When I'm wearing my "radiology research" support hat it assumes I'm also wearing my "MRI physics" hat and to weaves everything for MRI. It's really annoying.

bandrami|1 month ago

Agree. Memory is absolutely a misfeature in almost every LLM use case

ibuildbots|1 month ago

It doesn't even change the responses a lot. I used ChatGPT for a year for a lot of personal stuff, and tried a new account with basic prompts and it was pretty much the same. Lots of glazing.