🤔 A starting question
Why do Grok, ChatGPT, or Claude sometimes start responding as if they've forgotten half of your dialogue?
The secret is simple: neural networks do not have human long-term memory. They have a context window — and it is always limited.
🔹 How AI memory works
• Every word or character you write turns into tokens.
• The model processes tokens and produces a response.
• A limited number of tokens fit in the 'window' (in Grok — 170-375k characters, in GPT-4 Turbo — up to 128k tokens, in Claude — up to 200k tokens).
What does this mean in practice?
For the model, the dialogue is like a stream: new messages push old ones down until they fall out of the window.
🔹 Why does AI forget?
1. Power Limitation
The larger the window, the more expensive the computations. Increasing memory directly = increasing cost.
2. Balance of speed and price
Keeping the entire dialogue for a year is too expensive. Therefore, old ones are pushed out.
3. Technical limits
Even if AI can process a million tokens, Telegram cuts the bot to 4096 characters per message.
🔹 Visual examples
• In Grok, you can 'fit' an entire 'Alice in Wonderland'.
• GPT-4 Turbo can hold about 300,000 words — that's like 4-5 full scientific articles.
• Claude 3 Opus — up to 200k tokens, which is about 500 pages of text.
But if you chat continuously, the first replies will eventually disappear from the context.
🔹 How is this different from a human
• A human has working memory of only 7±2 items (according to Miller's law).
• AI has hundreds of thousands of characters.
• But! We have long-term memory for years, while neural networks only have a temporary window.
✅ Conclusion
AI 'forgets' not because it's dumb, but because its memory is limited by technical constraints.
The context window = RAM. If it is not enough, old data gets dropped.
❓ A question for readers
Would you want your AI to never forget and keep all your dialogues, or is it better for it to clear its memory?
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