In an interview with Ryan Mather, Federico Villa, and Robin Chen, OpenAI product designer Benjamin Zweig explains why designing memory for ChatGPT required studying how people remember. The work moved beyond the UI. Zweig had to turn invisible human judgment into training examples and evaluation rules that would shape the model’s behavior:

And the core of it all really is, how do you turn qualitative decisions into a quantifiable rubric? That’s exactly how you train a model to get better at any task.

Here, this meant formalizing the very human skill of determining what’s worth remembering, both in terms of what you save and when you recall it. If you ask a person to explain how they make that decision, they’re not going to have a clear answer for you. It’s an inherently human thing. So what you do is you look at a bunch of examples, apply your human intuition to make a decision, and then look for patterns and ways to turn that intuition into a heuristic that you can train against. That’s a new skill for many designers, and a new way of thinking and working.