ChatGPT's "Memory" tips the scales for now

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In my last “bake off” of which GPT clicked best for me and served my needs, Grok was the clear winner.

This week, ChatGPT put itself strongly back in the running by adding the “extended memory” capability. First use case? Improving all my prompts.

I have a collection of documents, tweets, thoughts, and mind maps I’ve been collecting on how to write great prompts. It’s a lot to remember. Now I don’t have to. I created a new conversation with ChatGPT:

I’m going to provide you with several documents that have information on how my prompts for GPTs can be better. In each conversation I have with you, I want you to reference this information and ask me questions that will improve my prompts before you actually address the question I’m asking. I’m willing to spend the extra time refining the prompt to get better answers unless I specifically indicate otherwise.

Then I fed it the prompt engineering documents, notes, and mindmaps from this channel.

Now, in any new conversation, I can invoke that “Prompt Refinement Process.” That way, before answering my query, ChatGPT asks me specific questions to improve the quality of my prompt without me having to remember all the things.

Since I’m still struggling mightily after moving from Notion (which I liked, but did not love) to Apple Notes, I thought I’d apply the new skills to getting it help me pick a notes app.

ChatGPT 2025-04-15 08.56.24
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Nevermind. ChatGPT is dumb. I’m going back to Grok.

Safari 2025-04-15 09.05.38
Safari 2025-04-15 09.05.382074×758 111 KB

AI is dumb. I’m going back to pen and paper.

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I must be missing the point. Why is AI dumb here? You don’t like OneNote as a recommendation based on your feature requirements?

Thanks for clarifying!

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as soon as i saw apple pencil (digital ink) there was only one valid product, OneNote.
I’ve been using it since 1998. Back then it was a viewsonic slate (first of its kind) and wacom stylus on Windows TabletPC. so funny that only months ago did apple finally add “hover” to its gesture palette.

what you’ll love about OneNote is its familiar 3-ring binder feel (if you’re old enough).
tab separators, pages, sub pages.
and once inside, it’s blocks which are paragraphs or blobs of ink.

enjoy!

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It was a (bad) joke, given that this is a Mac forum and AI recommended a Microsoft product.

I’ll be trying out OneNote for the next few weeks to see how it does. I haven’t used it in years.

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Update - really struggling with onenote. The text “boxes” it creates aren’t aligned and have no “snap to grid” function to align them. Also, it offers text styles but you can’t update or change them like you can in the other office apps. We’re not off to a good start.

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We use OneNote a little at work since you can use them as shared notebooks in Teams channels, so they’re handy sketchbooks. But it’s really hard to structure anything. If you want to take fairly free form notes it’s kind of nice, but if you actually have a big chunk of data you want to organise, it’s a bit pants.

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