I turned off chatGPT memory entirely because it doesn't know how to segment itself. I was getting inane comments like this when asking about winter tires:

Because you work in firmware (so presumably you appreciate measurement, risk, durability) you might be more critical of the “wear sooner than ideal” signals and want a tire with more robustness.

There was a phase when ChatGPT would respond to everything I said, even in the same request with something like “..here’s the thing that you asked for, of course, without the fluff.” Or blah blah blah “straight to the point.” Or some such thinly veiled euphemisms. No matter how many times I told it not to talk like that, it didn’t work until I found that “core memory”.

I have the same issue.

I often get annoyed with ChatGPT yammering on and on, so I repeatedly told it to cut to the chase and speak more succinctly.

Now it just says "I'll get right to the point..." and then still yammers on and on unabated.

LLMs are like children; telling them to not do something puts the idea in their 'head'.

Instead, telling them to do the opposite works. "Brevity is appreaciated", or "Preserve Tokens and be concise."

It’s called the waluigi problem and is also part of the reason why you can never fully “censor” an LLM; there is always some jailbreak possible

This happened to me too. I eliminated it in text responses, but eventually figured out that there's a system prompt in voice mode that says to do this (more or less) regardless of any instructions you give to the contrary. Attempting to override it will just make it increasingly awkward and obvious.

I went from using voice mode near-exclusively for brainstorming and planning out projects to giving up on voice altogether because of this very thing.

Might not be the best fix but other than disabling memory I changed the setting ‘ChatGPT personality’ to ‘Robot’ and I’ve always had straight to the point answers (so far).

Yeah, ChatGPT is a tool not a therapist with robot mode on and all memory options disabled. It’s awesome.

I add "Terse, no commentary" to a request, which it will obey, but then immediately return to yammering in a follow-up message. However, this is in Incognito; maybe there's a setting when logged in.

You can add a custom instruction in settings. That works pretty well, applies to all chats. Memory feature I of course disabled as soon as it was released so I don't know which takes precedence.

With GPT5 there is a persona (I think, I forget what the call it) setting, I chose "Robot" and that shut it up pretty well.

Same. The GPT5 “Robot” persona does what no custom “be terse”, “no fluff”, etc. custom prompt ever could. It actually makes ChatGPT terse and to-the-point and eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) fluff. I love it.

ChatGPT gets about 2-3x as smart the second you turn off memories.

That’s funny. Your phrasing reminds me of a Zappa line “dumb all over and a little ugly on the side”.

Interesting, that's been driving me absolutely bananas, especially in the voice chat where it takes up like 60% of the response. What kind of core memory did you turn off and how did you find it?

It was something I instructed it once and forgot about. When I checked in the settings under “memories” I finally discovered the culprit and removed it.

I’m not sure about voice chat, though - it’s equally frustrating for me. Often, it’s excessively verbose, repeating my question with unnecessary commentary that doesn’t contribute to the answer. I haven’t tried the personality tweaks they recently introduced in the settings - I wonder if those also affect voice chat, because that could be a potential solution.

I hate that. ChatGPT makes itself sound smarter through compression and insider phrasing, and the output is harder to read without adding real clarity. That's why I can't use o3 or GPT-5. The performance layer gets in the way of the actual content, and it's not worth parsing through. I'm mostly avoiding it now.

I just had to do this the other day. I got tired of it referring to old chats in ways that made no sense and were unrelated to my problem. I even had to unset the Occupation field because it would answer every question with "Well, being that you're an ENGINEER, here are some particularly refined ideas for you."

A couple of months ago I experienced this weird bug where instead of answering my questions, ChatGPT would discuss rome random unrelated topic about 95% time. I had to turn it off, too.

Carthago delenda est.

This happens with GPT-5 (instant) but not on Thinking mode. The instant response mode is just so much worse than the Thinking mode, I wish I could turn it off entirely and default to Low Thinking mode (still fast enough for live convo)

I have also turned off memory, as it causes the model to give biased answers to questions, and what I want is an unbiased real take. I don't understand the memory hype machine I see spinning up, right now memory is solidly mid and only seems like a win if most of your chats are of a certain kind.

I think memories might be more for people who use chatGPT as a companion rather than a tool.

I have also had bad experiences with it and turned it off - especially for creative stuff like mocking up user interfaces it gets “poisoned” but whatever decision it made in some chat 6mo ago and never really iterates on different outcomes unless you steer it away which takes up a bunch of time.

This sounds really annoying. I prefer claudes opt in implementation, where if you want to reference an earlier chat you can just say, remember we spoke about xyz and otherwise the feature seems to be completely off.

How long ago was this? I had this same experience, but there's a new implementation for memory as of a few months ago which seems to have solved this weird "I need to mention every memory in every answer" behavior.

Can you start a new message in incognito mode in ChatGPT because that would solve my problem. I also hate having it remember my history across chats because it pollutes the current chat.

You can use Projects to fix this I think

Being able to search browser history with natural language is the feature I am most excited for. I can't count the number of times I've spent >10 minutes looking for a link from 5 months ago that I can describe the content of but can't remember the title.

In my experience, as long as the site is public, just describing what I want to ChatGPT 5 (thinking) usually does the trick, without having to give it access to my own browsing history.

I think that such feature is already available in Chrome https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/15305774?hl=en

Ah, makes sense why I need to use an extension for that:

> To use this feature, you must be located in the US

I just don't get this. Google has SO MANY THINGS that are US only. While most other companies release things to everyone (like OpenAI).

How does Google expect to compete with OpenAI globally if they keep limitting the rest of the world?

Google is an established business, OpenAI is desperately burning money trying to come up with a business plan. Exports controls and compliance probably isn't going to be today's problem for them, ever.

They don't, the Gemini crap is dead in the water and only people who care about it are hackernews people or some weirdos. For normies ChatGPT equals AI and that's that, they already won by the brand alone.

When normies hear Gemini, they cringe and get that icky feeling.

It didn't help that when Gemini came out it was giving you black founding fathers and Asian nazis.

My dad uses Gemini because it's the default thingy on his android phone - I asked him if he used ChatGPT and he said yes and navigated to Gemini. Most people really don't care that much I think.

What's not to get? Talk to your political representatives about reining in the EDPB if you want access to cutting edge features.

Or if you are not in the EU, spend more money I guess and become an attractive market.

"Ask your politicians to allow foreign companies free reign with users' data" is certainly a wild take.

It's google's choice to forgo privacy and thus a huge market like the EU. Other companies, like OpenAI, seem to manage fine.

At some point, Europe will learn that if they keep preventing international solutions without creating a climate in which similar or better local solutions can emerge, they are cutting their own nose to spite the face. There are secondary and tertiary effects of this, and eventually the 'huge market' will shrink in importance. I mean, Brazil is a huge market, and no-one cares about them thanks to brain-dead legislation concerning tech imports and economic irrelevance.

No one cares about it because you get robbed on gunpoint at the stoplights.

Again no one in Europe cares about some Gemini because frankly no one even knows what it is. They had their run with the black founding fathers and most people who tried it then dismissed it forever.

For normal people ChatGPT = AI.

I don't think this is true though. Lots of people around me use "ChatGPT" but then are actually using Gemini because that's what is on their phone.

Maybe those features are illegal in every other country.

Its not by choice

Isn’t this what Recall in Windows 11 is trying to solve, and everyone got super up in arms over it?

I have no horse in the race either way, but I do find it funny how HN will swoon over a feature from one company and criticize to no end that same feature from another company just because of who made it.

At least Recall is on-device only, both the database and the processing.

> I do find it funny how HN will swoon over a feature from one company and criticize to no end that same feature from another company

It's pretty easy to explain if you assume that HN consists of multiple people with varying opinions.

I'm the last person to defend OpenAI on literally anything and personally I hope they crash and burn in a spectacular fashion and take the whole market down with them, but you at least have a choice in using Atlas as it's simply a program that you install on your computer of your own volition. With Recall, there's no choice, M$ will just shove it down your throat whether you want it or not, and most likely (knowing their history it's pretty much a guarantee) you'll be stuck with the privacy nightmare that is Recall with nothing you can do about it.

So the pushback makes perfect sense to me. Also, HN isn't 1 entity, it's many people with many different opinions, you can easily find people who were/are excited about Recall the same way people are excited about Atlas.

I think it makes sense, many don't have a choice to run Windows (Linux/Mac won't work for them for whatever reason). If MS turned on Recall without a disable (and its not hard to believe they wouldn't, onedrive), people would be upset.

With ChatGPT Atlas, you simply uninstall it. done.

Are we talking searching the URLs and titles? Or the full body of the page? The latter would require tracking a fuckton of data, including a whole lot of potentially sensitive data.

All of these LLMs already have the ability to go fetch content themselves, I'd imagine they'd just skim your URLs then do it's own token-efficient fetching. When I use research mode with Claude it crawls over 600 web pages sometimes so imagine they've figured out a way to skim down a lot of the actual content on pages for token context.

I made my own browser extension for that, uses readability and custom extractors to save content, but also summarizes the content before saving. Has a blacklist of sites not to record. Then I made it accessible via MCP as a tool, or I can use it to summarize activity in the last 2 weeks and have it at hand with LLMs.

A tangential issue is that pages often change over time. So your snapshot could be stale. Not sure whether that’s a bug or a feature.

Opera had the latter before switching to Chromium... I miss it.

I find browser history used to be pretty easy to search through and then Google got cute by making it into your "browsing journeys" or something and suddenly I couldn't find anything

How can you trust company that says Privacy in your control or some nonsense like that, when they scraped the whole internet and breached the foundation of privacy :)

I do see the copyright/intellectual property angle of training LLMs on the entire web, but what's the privacy issue here?

If you publish something on the web, what are you expecting to happen?

You should try us :) open-source and privacy-first alternative to Atlas -- https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS

Seems like it's based on Chromium? If so, that's a no-go for me. We need more web diversity and support smaller browser engines, we don't need yet another Chromium/Blink based browser.

I agree with this sentiment, but besides Webkit/Chromium and Firefox's Gecko, there's not really any options. Ladybird is a new implementation gaining fast though don't think it's ready to replace everyday workflows yet. And Ladybird has been a huge undertaking of course.

Building a new browser engine is 99% of the work and slapping LLM features on it is the other 1% of it.

Copying public data isn’t a breach of anyone’s privacy.

If they're the browser then they can see non-public data since people will be browsing those pages.

Chrome for sure

I tried making it my default browser because of (4)

You miss the most questionable bit which is asking for keychain access. I said no to that one.

A browser using your keychain seems like the least questionable bit, if anything.

Weird, I didn't get that question. It asked for full disk access so it could import my Safari settings, but that was optional.

When I was testing out Agent mode I had to give it login details in clear text (throw away account). Keychain access is very sensible.

This may be the first time I see a 'perk' of choosing a browser as default.

People will probably leave it default past the perk period.

> People will probably leave it default past the perk period.

That’s the idea. It’s an obvious dark pattern. Just like a free trial which automatically stars billing you at the end of the period.

this is genius to be honest

> You're in control - memories stay private.

For now.

I’m surprised they released something so underwhelming. This will take zero market share from existing browsers.

The wars between LLMs are still hot, it's not expensive to get enough access for LLMs, like student version of Gemini.

More access for free users might not provide enough attraction.

It feels like a natural competitive extension to any company seriously trying to usurp Google's browser domination including but not limited to paying Apple to be the default search engine

Why? Sounds quite competitive to me. Making chatgpt only work with their own browser would be anti-competitive.

I dunno... it sounds better than giving Apple/Mozilla/etc. dump-trucks of money to make Google my default search engine.

Very slightly better, but only very slightly, and Google's tactic was ruled illegal anti-competition so this feels like an attempt to find a loophole

getting an 50 mile Uber ride for $25 when taxi was charging me $100 sure got that app onto my phone... once I had the app on the phone...

Or maybe a prime example of healthy capitalism! /s