Andrej Karpathy@karpathy
When working with LLMs I am used to starting "New Conversation" for each request.
But there is also the polar opposite approach of keeping one giant conversation going forever. The standard approach can still choose to use a Memory tool to write things down in between conversations (e.g. ChatGPT does so), so the "One Thread" approach can be seen as the extreme special case of using memory always and for everything.
The other day I've come across someone saying that their conversation with Grok (which was free to them at the time) has now grown way too long for them to switch to ChatGPT. i.e. it functions like a moat hah.
LLMs are rapidly growing in the allowed maximum context length *in principle*, and it's clear that this might allow the LLM to have a lot more context and knowledge of you, but there are some caveats. Few of the major ones as an example:
- Speed. A giant context window will cost more compute and will be slower.
- Ability. Just because you can feed in all those tokens doesn't mean that they can also be manipulated effectively by the LLM's attention and its in-context-learning mechanism for problem solving (the simplest demonstration is the "needle in the haystack" eval).
- Signal to noise. Too many tokens fighting for attention may *decrease* performance due to being too "distracting", diffusing attention too broadly and decreasing a signal to noise ratio in the features.
- Data; i.e. train - test data mismatch. Most of the training data in the finetuning conversation is likely ~short. Indeed, a large fraction of it in academic datasets is often single-turn (one single question -> answer). One giant conversation forces the LLM into a new data distribution it hasn't seen that much of during training. This is in large part because...
- Data labeling. Keep in mind that LLMs still primarily and quite fundamentally rely on human supervision. A human labeler (or an engineer) can understand a short conversation and write optimal responses or rank them, or inspect whether an LLM judge is getting things right. But things grind to a halt with giant conversations. Who is supposed to write or inspect an alleged "optimal response" for a conversation of a few hundred thousand tokens?
Certainly, it's not clear if an LLM should have a "New Conversation" button at all in the long run. It feels a bit like an internal implementation detail that is surfaced to the user for developer convenience and for the time being. And that the right solution is a very well-implemented memory feature, along the lines of active, agentic context management. Something I haven't really seen at all so far.
Anyway curious to poll if people have tried One Thread and what the word is.
