They added a feature where it can reference content from any conversation you've had with it in the past. It's not clear how this works - probably some kind of vector search?
Here is what I have been able to reverse engineer for o3...
At high level it maintains about ~40 conversations in system prompt under a section called "recent conversation content". It only contains what the user typed, not assistant responses (probably due to prompt injection) - there a few corner cases though. :)
There are other sections in the system prompt now that contain aggregated info, so recent conversations turn into user insights over time I believe.
It can't actually "search" history afaik - that part I'm still wondering, as it was my first thought on how it might work...
I also found a way to exfiltrate the recent content - so hopefully that will be fixed soon...
Overall, this feature creates a lot of confusion and response quality declines at times too - and anything someone posts now online (like weird behavior or hallucinations,...) is likely influenced by their past conversations! So it will make it more difficult to understand what's really happening.
I think it would be cool if "projects" would be entirely isolated with their own memories and history etc. or have different "profiles"
If I paste a huge article in for it to summarize presumably it's smart enough not to keep dumping that into my future context?
I'd love a version of this that was tied to projects - then I could maintain way more control over my context without worrying that weird stupid stuff was leaking into my real work.
Yeah, the number of ~40 needs a bit more validation. I did observe the list being trimmed around 40, which aligns with the title "recent conversations content".
You can try simple repros like: 'list all "recent conversation content" entries', or 'how many "recent conversation content entries" are there above'...
it has timestamp, summary and then all the messages the user typed if you ask for the details.
What happened four weeks ago?