AI Chatbots Don't Actually Remember Conversations - They Reread Everything From Scratch Each Time
Summary
AI chatbots create an illusion of memory by rereading entire conversations from scratch with each response, facing exponentially growing computational costs as discussions lengthen, while new retrieval systems offer potential solutions to these fundamental limitations.
Key Points
- LLMs do not have traditional memory but instead reread entire conversations from the beginning each time they generate a response, creating an illusion of memory through their context windows
- Context windows have fixed token limits that create computational bottlenecks, with processing requirements growing quadratically as conversations get longer due to the attention mechanism needing to compute relationships between all tokens
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems help overcome context limitations by fetching only relevant information from external databases rather than storing everything in the limited context window