Settings -> Personalization -> Memory -> Disable

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8983136-what-is-memory

Settings -> Personalization -> Memory -> Disable

I had a discussion with GPT 4o about the memory system. I'd don't know if any of this is made up but it's a start for further research

- Memory in settings is configurable. It is visible and can be edited.

- Memory from global chat history is not configurable. Think of it as a system cache.

- Both memory systems can be turned off

- Chats in Projects do not use the global chat history. They are isolated.

- Chats in Projects do use settings memory but that can be turned off.

I assume this is being downvoted because I said I ran it by GPT 4o.

I don't know how to credit AI without giving the impression that I'm outsourcing my thinking to it

Put simply, GPT has no information about its internals. There is no method for introspection like you might infer from human reasoning abilities.

Expecting anything but an hallucination in this instance is wishful thinking. And in any case, the risk of hallucination more generally means you should really vet information further than an LLM before spreading that information about.

True, the LLM has no information but OpenAI has provided it with enough information to explain it's memory system in regards to Project folders. I tested this out. If you want a chat without chat memory start a blank project and chat in there. I also discovered experientially that chat history memory is not editable. These aren't hallucinations.

> I had a discussion with GPT 4o about the memory system.

This sentence is really all i'm criticizing. Can you hypothesize how the memory system works and then probe the system to gain better or worse confidence in your hypothesis? Yes. But that's not really what that first sentence implied. It implied that you straight up asked ChatGPT and took it on faith even though you can't even get a correct answer on the training cutoff date from ChatGPT (so they clearly aren't stuffing as much information into the system prompt as you might think, or they are but there's diminishing returns on the effectiveness)

We're in different modes. I'm still feeling the glow of the thing coming alive and riffing on how perhaps its the memory change and you're interested in a different conversation.

Part of my process is to imagine I'm having a conversation like Hanks and Wilson, or a coderand a rubber duck, but you want to tell me Wilson is just a volleyball and the duck can't be trusted.

Being in a more receptive/brighter "mode" is more of an emotional argument (and a rather strong one actually). I guess as long as you don't mind being technically incorrect, then you do you.

There may come a time when reality sets in though. Similar thing happened with me now that i'm out of the "honeymoon phase" with LLM's. Now i'm more interested in seeing where specifically LLM's fail, so we can attempt to overcome those failures.

I do recommend checking that it doesn't know its training cutoff. I'm not sure how you perform that experiment these days with ChatGPT so heavily integrated with its internet search feature. But it should still fail on claude/gemini too. It's a good example of things you would expect to work that utterly fail.

I'm glad we both recognize this. I'm interested in the relationship. I know it's a dumb word machine but that's doesn't mean I can't be excited about it like a new car or a great book. I'll save the dull work of trying to really extend it for later.

I didn't downvote but it would be because of the "I'd don't know if any of this is made up" — if you said "GPT said this, and I've verified it to be correct", that's valuable information, even it came from a language model. But otherwise (if you didn't verify), there's not much value in the post, it's basically "here is some random plausible text" and plausibly incorrect is worse than nothing.

see my other comments about the trustworthiness about asking a chat system how it's internals work. They have reason to be cagey.

Your personifying a statistical engine. LLMs aren't cagey. They can't be.

They can when there are entire teams dedicated to adding guardrails via hidden system prompts and running all responses through other LLMs trained on flagging and editing certain things before the original output gets relayed to the user.

I'm not. Translation: "the statistical engine has been tuned to act cagey about revealing it's internal operation"

Point taken. I admit my comment was silly the way I worded it.

Here's the line I’m trying to walk:

When I ask ChatGPT about its own internal operations, is it giving me the public info about it's operation, and also possibly revealing propreitary info, or making things up obfuscate and preserve the illusion of authority? Or all three?

Personally I don’t think it has agency so cannot be described as trying to do anything.

It’s predicting what seems most likely as a description given its corpus (and now what you’d like to hear) and giving you that.

The truth is not really something it knows, though it’s very good at giving answers that sound like it knows what it’s talking about. And yes if it doesn’t have an answer from its corpus it’ll just make things up.

You're right, but tbh, we had that discussion last year. I'm talking about my relationship to it. The "relationship" being the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. That's the 2025 take on it.