Does ChatGPT Remember Everything You Tell It?

Many people think ChatGPT remembers everything you type. But the truth is: it forgets most things especially between chats.

If you rely on ChatGPT for technical work, project planning, or even casual research, knowing how memory really works will help you avoid confusion and wasted time.

How ChatGPT Memory Actually Works

By default, ChatGPT doesn’t have long-term memory. It only remembers what you say during a single conversation up to a limit of 100,000 tokens. (That’s about the size of a 300-page book.)

A token is just part of a word. Once your chat gets too long, it starts forgetting older parts of the conversation even if you’re still in the same session.

So if you’ve ever had it forget what you said five minutes ago, you weren’t imagining it.

How to Make ChatGPT Remember More

If you want ChatGPT to remember facts, preferences, or your workflow across different chats? There’s a simple fix:

Turn on the Memory feature:

1. Open Settings inside ChatGPT.

2. Look for the Memory section.

3. Turn it on.

   

With memory turned on, ChatGPT can start storing helpful details across sessions like your name, writing style, or what type of projects you usually work on.

Let’s say you’re building a pump sizing tool and you return a week later to improve it. Without memory, ChatGPT starts from scratch. With memory turned on, it remembers your goal and saves you time re-explaining everything.

This is crucial for engineers using ChatGPT to iterate on designs, reports, or calculations over time.

ChatGPT’s memory isn’t infinite but with the right settings, it gets much smarter.

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