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MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems

Lets language models move information between their context window and external storage. Memory editing, retrieval, and function chaining support conversations and document analysis beyond a single prompt's capacity.

Introduction

A larger prompt is only one way to remember more. The central insight is to treat the context window as working memory: let the model decide which information to keep nearby and which to retrieve later, borrowing the paging idea from operating systems.

Key Findings
  • On the paper's deep-memory retrieval task, GPT-4 Turbo accuracy rises from 35.3% to 93.4% with memory management; access to searchable history matters beyond a conversation summary.
  • Chained function calls enable repeated document searches and nested key-value lookups, making retrieval an iterative reasoning process.
  • Memory-pressure alerts prompt information preservation before older messages leave the active context.
Who Should Read It

Great fit if you design persistent assistants and need a concrete memory architecture. Look elsewhere if you require guaranteed recall or a single-call latency budget: the paper reports premature search termination and sensitivity to the underlying model's function-calling ability.

The reported evaluations use specific model versions and tasks; they establish an architectural direction rather than universal performance guarantees.

Information

  • Websitearxiv.org
  • OrganizationsUniversity of California, Berkeley
  • AuthorsCharles Packer, Sarah Wooders, Kevin Lin, Vivian Fang, Shishir G. Patil, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez
  • Published date2023/10/12

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