AI chatbots need to be much better at remembering things. Have scientists just cracked their terrible memory problem?
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are terrible at remembering things — both between separate conversations and even during the same conversation. But two recent breakthroughs might completely change this. If you talk to a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI's ChatGPT for long enough, it will begin to forget crucial pieces of information — especially if the conversation stretches on for more than 4 million words of input. Its performance then begins to deteriorate rapidly. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and other LLMs can't retain information between conversations. For example, if you finish one conversation and reboot ChatGPT a week later, the chatbot won't remember anything from the previous exchange. But two separate teams have potentially found solutions to these memory issues. A team of scientists led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have pinpointed the reason AI forgets things mid-conversation and come up with a method to fix it, while dev...