I recently switched an existing long-running ChatGPT Project from Default memory to Project-only memory. I expected this to isolate the project’s history from the rest of my account while preserving the ability of chats inside the project to reference older conversations from that same project.
Instead, it seems that most of the project’s historical context became inaccessible.
Before switching to Project-only memory, I started an unrelated chat outside the project and asked what it knew about this project. It was able to describe quite a lot of it, including a distinctive concept I had discussed in one of the project’s older conversations from 2024-2025. The UI also showed that old conversation being used as a reference.
I then switched the project to Project-only memory and waited three days for the change to fully take effect. After that, I started a new chat inside the same project and asked about the same concept. ChatGPT no longer knew what I was referring to. When I asked what previous project chats it could identify from its available context, it listed only three recent conversations, despite the project containing many more.
The sequence was:
- In a chat outside the project, ChatGPT could retrieve information from an old conversation inside the project.
- I switched that existing project from Default memory to Project-only memory.
- I waited three days.
- In a new chat inside the project, ChatGPT could no longer retrieve that older information and seemed to have access only to a few recent project chats.
The old conversations were not deleted. I searched ChatGPT for the distinctive concept name, and search correctly identified the older chat that contained it and took me to the specific message where the concept was mentioned. That conversation is also still visibly inside the same project.
So the chat itself is still there and searchable, but a new conversation inside the same project seems unable to retrieve it through Project memory.
Has anyone else who converted an existing long-running Project to Project-only memory seen the same problem, especially with older conversations?
In my experience, ChatGPT’s normal memory has often been surprisingly good at retrieving old and specific information from previous conversations, sometimes referencing chats I had not thought about for a long time. If that kind of retrieval is already possible across an entire account, I would expect it to work at least as well within the much smaller and clearly bounded set of conversations in a Project with Project-only memory.
So I obviously don’t expect ChatGPT to read every chat in the project every time I ask it about something from previous conversations. But I would expect it to at least know what chats are there and be able to find an older one when something relevant comes up, or when I explicitly ask it to use that chat as a reference - just like it already works account-wide, or ideally even better given it’s one isolated project.
This feels especially important for long-running projects. If the old chats are still inside the project but ChatGPT can’t really reach them anymore after changing the mode, then a big part of what makes Projects useful is lost - especially when the name Project-only memory itself implies that the project is supposed to work as its own isolated context.
It would also be very useful to have some kind of Refresh / Re-index Project Memory option when things break like this. I don’t know what exactly happens internally, but there should be a way to tell ChatGPT to rebuild whatever it uses to remember or retrieve the chats that are already inside that project.
I also think it would be useful to be able to see some kind of summary of what ChatGPT currently remembers about the project - basically, what it currently “knows” about it. That would make it much easier to notice when project memory is incomplete or has stopped working properly.