The ability of AI to "remember" is really a function of how it was designed and the context in which its being deployed. Unlike humans, most conversational AIs — even the ones in talk to ai type platforms — don't possess long-term memory. While they can process and store some information temporarily during a conversation that is currently ongoing, once the conversation ends, the system forgets everything. As an example, the popular AI model GPT-4 is currently limited to 4,000 tokens (words or parts of words) in a single conversation. Thus, it can refer back to previous messages within the same conversation. After the session is completed, the contextual information resets.
But there are AI systems that can retain information over several conversations. AI systems such as IBM Watson can store histories of user interactions in their databases and use those to personalize customer care applications. E.g. customer querying about an earlier order from a chatbot and the AI can fetch relevant information to respond to them[[6]]. IBM has found that these truly Cognitive systems can see as much as a 20% increase in customer satisfaction when they recall past interactions.
However, AI's memory is not human memory. Besides, AI does not exactly have human-like memory. Rather, it makes sense of patterns in data and uses them to produce content. This why AI seems to "remember" things while you are talking but is unable to remember any personal information or experiences after the chat session ends. While AI systems such as Amazon's Alexa store preferences and data about users, this memory is stored in the cloud rather than held by the AI itself. The information stored here can also be managed or deleted by users.
More sophisticated neural network AIs, like Google DeepMind, use something called a neural network that learns from previous data to predict better and perform at a higher level. This ability improved efficiency by 15% in 2020, according to DeepMind. But this memory is less about remembering specific events and more about enhancing AI with the capacity to be capable of greater data processing.
So finally, to sum up, AI memory is mostly temporary involving the scope of conversation or even data saved externally in few applications. AI systems such as talk to ai can remember information during a session, but it is not permanent memory. The aim is to develop systems with real memory that help them learn and evolve over time, enabling AI models to remember users between interactions and offer more personalized experiences.