Agent memory

There is no memory inside the model. Anything that persists is a file some program wrote and read back.

Part of the Memory and truth track on lAItest.

An assistant that "remembers your name" looked it up. Between one message and the next, the model holds nothing whatsoever.

Every request starts from zero.

A model call is stateless. The feeling of memory comes entirely from the program around it, which saves something after a turn and pastes it back before the next one. That store might be the raw conversation, a rolling summary, a set of facts in a database, or a file the agent keeps about itself and its user.

A common misconception

Commonly believed: Memory means the model is gradually learning about me.

Actually: Only if someone is fine-tuning on your data, which is rare, slow and deliberate. Ordinary memory changes no weights at all. It changes what gets retrieved and pasted into the next prompt. Which is why memory fails in a very particular way: one fact, written down badly, keeps coming back in every future session until something deletes it.

Memory is retrieval with a write path.

So it inherits every problem in this track, plus new ones. What is worth writing down? Under what wording will it be found again? What happens when two notes contradict each other? What comes back when the new question is only loosely related to the old one? Storing things is the easy half. Deciding what deserves to persist, and what should expire, is the hard half.

An agent keeps insisting your project uses a database you removed months ago. Where is the fault most likely to be?

Answer: A stale note in its memory store keeps being retrieved and pasted into the prompt. Memory is a store the surrounding program reads and writes, not something held inside the model. A wrong entry survives every new session until it is corrected or deleted, because nothing in the loop ever re-checks it against reality. That is why memory systems need editing, expiry and review as much as they need writing.

In one sentence

Memory is a filing system with the model's name on it, and files rot unless somebody tends them.