Optimize ChatGPT for Long Conversations with Automatic Summarization and Adaptive Context Management

I hope this is the right place for this type of message. Feel free to let me know where I should be posting this if not. Thanks so much for your time!

The Issue:
ChatGPT often struggles with maintaining performance and relevance during long conversations. This is especially true for users like me who prefer ongoing, meaningful threads that grow over time. The system appears to process the entire conversation history at all times, which can lead to slower responses, degraded performance, or even hitting practical limits where restarting a conversation becomes necessary. This disrupts the flow of interaction and makes it harder to maintain continuity.

Proposed Solution:
To address this issue, I propose implementing a system that automatically summarizes conversation history and manages context more effectively. The following features could work together to achieve this:

*Automatic Summarization:*
    After a certain length of conversation, older parts of the thread could be summarized into concise key points. These summaries would retain the essence of the discussion while reducing computational overhead.
    Users could edit or refine these summaries for accuracy if needed.

*On-Demand Retrieval:*
    While the full history would not be loaded by default, users could still request specific segments of the conversation to be reloaded temporarily for review or reference.

*Priority Context Management:*
    The system could prioritize recurring topics, decisions, or emotional tones that are most relevant to the ongoing discussion. Less pertinent details would be archived but accessible on demand.

*Session Partitioning:*
    Long conversations could be divided into manageable “sessions” that remain connected by themes or user-defined continuity, without overwhelming the system.

*User-Adjustable Settings:*
    Allow users to choose the level of summarization or whether they want to preserve the full context for their conversations. This would provide flexibility for different preferences and use cases.

Why This Would Be Beneficial:

*Improved Performance:*
    Reducing the amount of active context processed at once would lead to faster and more consistent responses.

*Enhanced User Experience:*
    Users could maintain ongoing, meaningful conversations without frequent restarts or interruptions.

*Resource Optimization:*
    Summarization would reduce the computational burden on the system, enabling more efficient usage of server resources.

*Greater Usability for Power Users:*
    This feature would be particularly useful for users who rely on ChatGPT for creative projects, ongoing problem-solving, or long-term engagement.

*Accessibility of History:*
    With on-demand retrieval and user-adjustable settings, the system would remain transparent and flexible, ensuring that no valuable information is lost.

I believe this feature would greatly enhance the functionality and usability of ChatGPT, making it more capable of meeting the diverse needs of its users.

Thank you for considering this suggestion, and I’m happy to elaborate further if needed!

6 Likes

I second this. I have a very long chat with 16 canvases and it gets painfully slow. It would be paramount to have some way to replace content with summaries that contain all relevant information, and then you could select if you want the original content or the detour for each canvas when generating new responses. It would be good to be able to influence which information the memory should contain, and be possible to manually select text to include in memories, or remove memories manually. That would significantly speed up the responses, which now take around 15 minutes (!!!).

1 Like

Oh my gosh, yes please! Using ChatGPT is wonderful and such a time-saver, until it isn’t. At some point it just stops responding. An option summarization mechanism like described here would be great.

I don’t know how it works because I’m not a programmer, but an interesting idea would be to at least hide or compress messages after X messages have been sent to the chat. For example, after 80 messages have been sent, the previous messages will be hidden or secluded as new messages are created, and if you want to go back and remember something, you can just have an arrow on each message to show the entire message. I think this would save processing time without losing the messages from that chat.