Dreaming: Better memory for a more helpful ChatGPT

Today we’re beginning to roll out a more capable and scalable system for synthesizing memory, developed to tackle the staleness, correctness, and scalability challenges that we observe when memory is applied to the hundreds of millions of users and multi-year time horizons in ChatGPT.

Memory is what helps ChatGPT learn your preferences, projects, and constraints, allowing future conversations to start from shared context rather than from scratch.

Over the last two years, memory has grown into a critical part of the ChatGPT experience, helping ChatGPT better understand your context so it can help you accomplish meaningful goals over time. This is central to making ChatGPT more useful: knowing you, helping you, and doing more for you.

This update is available to Plus and Pro users in the US today, and will roll out to additional countries and Free and Go users over the coming weeks.

How memory has evolved

Memory first launched in April 2024 (also known as saved memories). The feature let you ask ChatGPT to remember information and carry it forward into future chats.

Saved memories were only written during the conversation and relied on strong cues to decide when to trigger memory, such as an instruction to "remember I’m traveling to Singapore in July." In practice, interacting with this system could feel like talking to someone who took a few notes, but still forgot everything that wasn’t written down. Saved memories also tend to go stale over time and eventually become incorrect or irrelevant.

In April 2025, we updated ChatGPT’s memory by giving the model the ability to reference chat context outside of the saved memories list; this was done by introducing the first version of dreaming—a method for ChatGPT to automatically curate memories in the background by referencing chat history.

Today, we are launching a significantly more capable and compute-efficient memory architecture built on top of dreaming.