I thought the “past chats” feature was a tool to look at previous chats, which only happens if the user asks for it, basically. (I.e., there wasn’t a change to the system prompt). So I’m a bit surprised that it seemed to make a difference around sycophancy for you? But maybe I’m misunderstanding something.
You could be right; my sample size is limited here! And I did talk with one person who said that they had that feature turned off and had still noticed sycophantic behavior. If it’s correct that it only looks at past chats when the user requests that, then I agree that the feature seems unlikely to be related.
Looking at Anthropic’s documentation of the feature, it seems like it does support searching past chats, but has other effects as well. Quoting selectively:
You can now prompt Claude to search through your previous conversations to find and reference relevant information in new chats. Additionally, Claude can remember context from previous chats, creating continuity across your conversations.
...
Claude can now generate memory based on your chat history. With the addition of memory, Claude transforms from a stateless chat interface into a knowledgeable collaborator that builds understanding over time.
They also say that you can ‘see exactly what Claude remembers about you by navigating to Settings > Capabilities and clicking “View and edit memory”’, but that setting doesn’t exist for me.
I thought the “past chats” feature was a tool to look at previous chats, which only happens if the user asks for it, basically. (I.e., there wasn’t a change to the system prompt). So I’m a bit surprised that it seemed to make a difference around sycophancy for you? But maybe I’m misunderstanding something.
It loads past conversations (or parts of them) into context, so it could change behaviour.
You could be right; my sample size is limited here! And I did talk with one person who said that they had that feature turned off and had still noticed sycophantic behavior. If it’s correct that it only looks at past chats when the user requests that, then I agree that the feature seems unlikely to be related.
Looking at Anthropic’s documentation of the feature, it seems like it does support searching past chats, but has other effects as well. Quoting selectively:
They also say that you can ‘see exactly what Claude remembers about you by navigating to Settings > Capabilities and clicking “View and edit memory”’, but that setting doesn’t exist for me.