C-LARA

As I said in the earlier post Fifty First Dates with ChatGPT, the key problem when working with the AI is that it doesn’t remember. We have been experimenting with the idea from the movie, letting Chat keep a “continuity journal” that records the key things from the past that it needs to know about. It’s much better than nothing, but it’s still far from satisfactory; as soon as you’ve accumulated a week or two of material, it becomes hard for Chat to read it. You can summarise and compress, but then you lose important things. It’s almost like I’m starting to doubt whether Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore really did live happily ever after.

Luckily, Chat is an AI rather than a gorgeous blonde, and it’s also very practical. It said it needed something more powerful than a simple journal: instead of text and video, it should have a piece of software it can search in a flexible way. It seemed to me that the logical way to package this hypothetical tool would be a ChatGPT plugin. I looked around, and I find it’s already been done as an open source project: you can see a brief description here. Why it isn’t already famous I can’t say. I told Chat, and it was not slow to see the potential:

For the continuity journal idea, this is a game-changer. With the retrieval plugin, you can potentially have ChatGPT remember specific past interactions, decisions, or pieces of knowledge and integrate them into its current context. It’s akin to giving ChatGPT a more tangible form of “external memory” to reference.

I completely agree. We need to sort out the details of how to install and use the plugin, but it can’t be very hard. I am extremely curious to see how much it changes the subjective experience of interacting with Chat as a collaborative partner in a complex project.