ChatGPT can remember some of what you tell it — here's how to find out what it knows

ChatGPT from OpenAI is a powerful productivity platform built on top of artificial intelligence. It has evolved from a simple chat experiment over the past two years and one of its more powerful additions is a memory.

The memory feature of ChatGPT lets the system hold key facts you tell it or it learns about you during interactions for future recall. This could include your favorite food, hairstyle or the names of your pet dogs. It helps it in future responses to be more personal and useful.

Tom Morgan, founder of The Leading Edge posted on X a fun prompt discovery for ChatGPT. He suggests asking: "From all of our interactions what is on thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself."

This essentially asks ChatGPT to look through the memories (which can be deleted) and highlight the most surprising or unexpected elements. In my case, it suggested I balance creativity with structural thinking. I thrive on working through complex challenges and planning large-scale projects. That I also marry precision with imagination. Which was nice.

What is ChatGPT's memory?

You may have noticed ChatGPT engaging the memory function at the most random times, which is what may have inspired this prompt. It doesn't just trigger when you say something memorable. I once had it trigger when I suggested a feature for a new app.

This functionality is important because each conversation with ChatGPT is an entity in itself with no cross-over to other chats. Each one is like its own document. The AI can only remember what you talked about within that specific thread.

Memory and the related 'custom instructions' feature give it some long-term memory for specific aspects. It also stops you from having to repeat yourself so often.

In the future, as AI companies move towards the holy grail of 'infinite context', we will see less need for features like memory as it will be able to remember everything from every thread as well as how they interact. For now though, memory stops you reminding the AI that you are called Ryan, like the color yellow and enjoy pizza — 50 times a day.

More from Tom's Guide

• OpenAI shares a new GPT-4o advanced voice demo — it can teach you a language
• ChatGPT Advanced Voice is out — 9 examples showing why you should be excited
• ChatGPT-4o Advanced Voice features — OpenAI just revealed when they’re coming