How ChatGPT stores memories about you

• December 10, 2025 at 23:10 IST
• ai
• chatgpt
• coding

I found a really interesting article by Manthan Gupta about how ChatGPT stores and seamlessly retrieves information about you when you chat with it. The article explains that ChatGPT receives the following context for every message you send:

[0] System Instructions
[1] Developer Instructions
[2] Session Metadata (ephemeral)
[3] User Memory (long-term facts)
[4] Recent Conversations Summary (past chats, titles + snippets)
[5] Current Session Messages (this chat)
[6] Your latest message

These stored info are passed to every future prompts as separate blocks, something like this:

- User's name is Manthan Gupta.
- Previously worked at Merkle Science and Qoohoo (YC W23).
- Prefers learning through a mix of videos, papers, and hands-on work.
- Built TigerDB, CricLang, Load Balancer, FitMe.
- Studying modern IR systems (LDA, BM25, hybrid, dense embeddings, FAISS, RRF, LLM reranking).

The blog post has much more information about how exactly this happens. He explains the process in great detail, and is really a fun read.

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