ChatGPT Now Remembers What You Say—Unless You Tell It to Forget

OpenAI is rolling out a new feature called Memory for ChatGPT, which lets the chatbot remember everything about you to offer more helpful responses. The feature is slowly being introduced to users on the Plus and Pro plans and is currently available in Canada, but won’t be available in the UK, EU, and a few other countries for now.

With memory turned on, ChatGPT can recall details between chats—like your name, food preferences, or hobbies—to make conversations feel more personal over time, says OpenAI. For example, if you tell it you’re vegetarian, it’ll remember that the next time you ask for a recipe. This is reaching next-levels of AI learning as everything you tell ChatGPT will be remembered.

“We have greatly improved memory in chatgpt–it can now reference all your past conversations! This is a surprisingly great feature [in my opinion], and it points at something we are excited about: ai systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman yesterday.

You can check what ChatGPT remembers by asking, “What do you remember about me?” You can also ask it to forget things or manage your memory settings manually under the “Personalization” section in Settings.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works according to the company’s FAQ page:

• Saved Memories: These are details you’ve directly told ChatGPT to remember, like “Remember I live in Toronto.” You can delete or update these anytime.
• Chat History: ChatGPT can also learn from your previous chats to improve future responses, even if you didn’t ask it to remember anything specific.

Both features can be turned off. If you want a memory-free session, you can use a Temporary Chat, which doesn’t reference or save any information. Enterprise and education users now have 20% more memory capacity, and account admins can control memory settings for their teams.

OpenAI says it doesn’t train its models using memory data unless users have opted in to “Improve the model for everyone.” Sensitive details, like health info, aren’t remembered unless users specifically ask for it.

Users on the free plan only get access to Saved Memories, not full chat history reference.

These fast-paced advances in generative AI are getting incredibly helpful, yet also kind of scary at how powerful it can be. Looking at the state of Apple’s Siri, it’s so far behind OpenAI, Google and Amazon right now. Who knows when Siri will ever become smart.