Your Greatest Advantage Over LLMs Is Your Long-Term Memory

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Your greatest advantage over LLMs is your long-term memory. You can efficiently move new information into your weights. They can’t. They basically have dementia and use an elaborate system of sticky notes like that movie Memento.

The way you hardwire information into your long-term memory is by doing your damn reps. If there’s knowledge that you need to build on top of, then you better do your manual reps until mastery. Otherwise you’ll never consolidate it into long-term memory and you’ll never be able to incorporate it into your systems thinking.

Imagine if everything you know about your best friend was not hardwired into your brain, but rather dumped into some markdown document system that gets bigger and bigger as your relationship gets deeper and deeper. Even with a million token context window, that would place an extremely shallow limit on your relationship with them.

That is today’s reality for anyone trying to use LLMs in any serious capacity. When you are doing something serious, you are developing a relationship with it that is as deep as a human relationship with a true best friend. You go through so much shit together, you have thousands of inside jokes, millions of things that nobody else knows, uncountably many bytes of rich context… all with this serious thing that you’re doing.

The only system that can absorb and integrate all that information is your literal biological brain. The information in your biological brain is what determines the ceiling of your capabilities.

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