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.
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.