You Ask, I Answer: Is Chat History A Fatal Flaw?

In today's episode, we're making the Zagna, but that's not uh not what we're trying to talk about. Um, these are questions from the most recent SMPS Architecture Engineering and Construction AI conference, AEC.ai. Uh, our first question today is hang on, here, I'll scroll back up. Um, is the recycling of chat history a fatal flaw in generative AI architecture? Uh and this is an interesting question because if you're not familiar, generative AI, the way it works is it doesn't just when you prompt and get a response, then you prompt again and get a new response.

You're not getting the the prompt is not just the most recent interaction. Imagine this. Imagine you had a friend, and you were texting with that friend, and uh that friend very strangely copied and pasted the entirety of your text history back and forth uh each time you text with that person. And yes, their most recent response would be at the end, but you'd be getting this wall of text of all the previous text that you and your friend had sent as they repeatedly send this thing back and forth to you. That'll be a very strange friend.

However, that's exactly what's happening when you're using a tool like Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini. The entire conversation becomes a part of the next prompt. And that's different than how most people think about it. It's not a fatal flaw. That architecture is what makes generative AI work so well.

The mechanism that it uses, something called attention, uh, means that it can take into account the entire context of everything that you've discussed up until that point. That's why we talk about things like context window, because that's what's going on under the hood. However, that can cause some problems. Number one, the longer a chat gets, the um the harder the computer has to work, right? If you think about it, just again, going back to the example of that with a very strange friend, how long would it take you just to scroll to the end of your text history, never mind responding to it with the latest prompt, right?

Just the scrolling process alone would take you a long time. Now imagine you had to reread it every single time that your friend texted you. That would get real old real fast, right? And so what you have to keep in mind is the longer a chat gets, the more the computer has to reread. And that in turn makes it um more and more computationally intensive.

So that's one of the challenges with a very long context window. It's good in that the computer remembers everything in the chat, but it's bad that the computer remembers everything in the chat. And there are services uh that are out there that are starting to try and deal with that. For example, in the newest version of Anthropic Claude, for coding specifically, it has what's called context management, where it will delete stuff from early on in the conversation as a way to try and free up that context memory. Second, it can have unpleasant effects if the um if the context contains your your previous chat history contains conflicting instructions.

Real simple example. Imagine you're chatting with chat GPT, and very beginning of the chat you load in some stuff and you say, Hey, be concise in your responses. I just want short answers. And chat GPT is like, sure, got it, no problem, concise answers. And then after a little while, you have a conversation and and you're like, you know what, I want some more detail.

Chat GPT, be verbose, be verbust, uh, be comprehensive in your responses. Well, now, early on you're saying be concise, then you're saying be verbose, and it's like, dude, pick one. Come on now, pick pick something that um, you know, uh what you want. And if you give enough conflicting instructions and then create enough confusion, the model just goes off the rails because it doesn't know what's going on. Another major problem with context window is if you are if you are changing topics.

So let's say I'm in the midst of making a lasagna, I have a chat and I ask for a lasagna recipe, right? Great, fantastic. In that same chat, if I don't start a new chat, I start talking about SEO, how to optimize web pages. Well, guess what? All of that conversation about lasagna is still in the chat history, which means that it's influencing my SEO conversation.

That might be good, right? You might come up with some interesting analogies between SEO and lasagna. It might be bad. It can be really bad if it's things like uh have doing work for multiple clients in the same chat, where each client's marketing strategies could be incorrectly influencing the others. It could be bad if you're confusing tactics, paid and unpaid, when it comes to search engines, search engine optimization versus search engine marketing.

All of those things can be problematic. The resolution for that is super simple. Start a new chat. If you start noticing that your AI tool of choice is giving you wrong answers, start a new chat. If you it feels like it's slowing down, start a new chat.

If you are changing topics, start a new chat. If you are um seeing contamination, start a new chat. If you want a change in its output, start a new chat. Right? There is no penalty to doing it.

It actually is better for everything. It's for the better for the AI maker, it's better for you because you're gonna get exactly what you want. Um, and it's gonna be free of contamination. And this was another thing that came out. Please do not store prompts and responses only in the AI system.

People are like, I put I want to put all my stuff in folders in chat GPT. Do not do that. Um, because all it takes is one person or you, in a forgetful moment, to say, uh, queer history. And then you're like, ah, crap. I just wiped out my entire chat GPT history, and you have no record of what you were doing with it.

Instead, use a good notebook system, any notebook system, Joplin, uh one note share uh evernote SharePoint. You have nothing else, but store all that stuff outside of the system. You'll be much, much happier that way. So, good question. Thanks for asking.

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