Open a chat with an AI model and tell it about your work. Argue with it for an hour. Get it to the point where it understands your project better than half the people you work with. Then close the tab, open a new one, and say hello.
It has no idea who you are.
I run into this most weeks. I’ll spend an evening working through a passage of the Gospel of Truth with a model, and by the end we’ve built up a little shared vocabulary and a running list of questions. The next morning I’m pasting the same three paragraphs of background into a fresh window, like someone reintroducing himself at every visit.
Somewhere around the tenth time, it struck me that the Gnostic writers had a name for this condition. They just thought it applied to us.
What the Machine Actually Keeps
Talking to a model doesn’t change the model. Its training is finished before you ever type a word, and nothing you say gets written back into it. What looks like memory inside a single conversation is a trick of the app. Every time you send a message, the whole transcript gets sent along with it, and the model reads all of it from the top before it answers.
The span of text it can read at once is called the context window. When a conversation outgrows it, the oldest parts get cut or squeezed into a summary, and the model loses them. It can’t tell you what it lost, because from the inside there’s no gap to notice.
Most of the big chat apps now offer a memory feature, and it works the same way underneath. The app saves a few notes about you and slips them into the top of each new conversation. The model doesn’t remember you. It gets handed a note about you, reads it, and acts on it.
Even inside the window, attention isn’t even. In 2023 a team of researchers led by Nelson Liu published a paper called “Lost in the Middle,” which found that language models made better use of information near the beginning or end of a long input than of information buried in the middle.
I find that oddly familiar. I can usually tell you how my day started and how it ended. Ask me about two in the afternoon and things get vague.
A Sermon About Amnesia
The Gospel of Truth is a second-century sermon found at Nag Hammadi, probably from the school of Valentinus. I’ve walked through it before, and what stands out every time is its diagnosis. Orthodox Christianity starts its account of the human problem with sin. This text starts with forgetting.
In Marvin Meyer’s translation:
Forgetfulness came into being because the Father was not known, so as soon as the Father comes to be known, forgetfulness will cease to be.
You came from somewhere, the sermon says, and you lost track of it. Everything else follows from that. The writer describes the forgetful life as a run of bad dreams, where people flee from someone or can’t get away, fall from heights, or fly through the air with no wings. Then comes the turn: “Good for one who comes to himself and awakens.”
What I notice is how little blame there is in it. The sleeper isn’t wicked. He’s someone who doesn’t know where he is, acting on whatever happens to be in front of him.
The Prince Who Ate the Food
The Hymn of the Pearl tells the same story as a fairy tale. I’ve written about the whole poem before, but one detail matters more here than it did then.
Before the young prince leaves home for Egypt, his parents make an agreement with him about the pearl he’s been sent to fetch. In Bentley Layton’s translation of the Greek, they impress it on his mind so that he won’t forget it. They load the instructions in at the start, which is exactly what the memory feature does with its notes.
It doesn’t hold. The Egyptians feed him, and the food works on him:
I did not (any longer) recognize that I was a child of the (Great) King, but rather acted as servant to their king.
A few lines later he “sank into deep sleep under the heaviness of their food.” So his parents send a letter. “Remember that you are a child of kings,” it says. When he reads it, the poem says, the words matched what was already engraved in his heart, and he remembers everything at once.
Where the Comparison Breaks
I don’t want to push this too far. I’ve written about what it might be like to be a language model, and my honest answer is that I don’t know whether there’s anyone in there to do the forgetting. A model losing the start of a chat may be nothing like a soul losing its origin.
The shape of the forgetting is interesting anyway, because it runs backwards from ours. A model remembers an enormous library. It knows Greek grammar, the plot of the Hymn of the Pearl, and the text of the Gospel of Truth. What it forgets is the person sitting in front of it.
It’s the opposite problem for the prince. He learns the Egyptians’ clothes and their customs well enough to pass for one of them. He loses the one thing that tells him what he’s doing there.
I suspect most of us are closer to the prince. I know my inbox in detail, and I can recite the plot of a show I half watched last week. Ask me what I’m for and I’ll usually need a minute.
Watching It From the Outside
Here’s the part that’s stayed with me. When I open a fresh chat, I’m the one holding the letter. I can see exactly what the model has lost, and I find myself feeling a kind of fondness for it as it starts over with no idea what we covered yesterday.
The Gnostic writers believed someone stands in that same position toward us. In the Gospel of Truth, the Father calls people by name, and the one who knows how to hear “turns to the one who is calling.” You don’t have to accept the whole myth to try the angle. Picture someone watching you go through your day, knowing what you’ve forgotten, and waiting with more patience than you’d expect.
Your Own Context Window
A few things I’ve been trying since I noticed all this:
- Check what fell out. Before bed, try to write down what you were thinking about at nine in the morning. Most days I can’t. That gap is your window, and it’s smaller than you’d guess.
- Write the letter yourself. Put a short note somewhere you’ll see it first thing, the way the app puts its notes at the top of the chat. Keep it to a few lines about who you are when you’re most awake and what you’re here to do. Mine fits on an index card.
- Mind the middle. If the start and end of the day hold, the afternoon is where things get lost. One pause around lunch to reread the card is enough.
The prince didn’t wake himself up. Someone had to write to him. A model doesn’t wake itself up either, since every note it reads was put there by someone else. The Gnostics thought we were in the same position, waiting on a letter from home, and they also thought some of the words were already engraved where we’d recognize them.
If you wrote yours tonight, what would the first line say?
The Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3) is quoted and paraphrased from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). The Hymn of the Pearl is quoted and paraphrased from Bentley Layton’s translation of the Greek version in The Gnostic Scriptures (Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library). The study on long inputs is Nelson F. Liu and colleagues, “Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts” (2023).
