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by thway15269037 173 days ago
ChatGPT to this day does not have a single simplest feature -- fork chat from message.

That's the thing even the most barebones open-source wrappers had since 2022. Probably even before because ERP stuff people played with predates chatgpt by like two years (even if it was very simple).

Gemini btw too.

4 comments

Well apparently 3 years later they did a thing. I asked about it so many times I didn't even bother to check if they added it.

Though I'm not sure if they did not sneak it as some part of AB-test because the last time I did check was in october and I'm pretty sure it was not there.

I believe they announced “branch in new chat” on Sept 5th, so you’re not far off.
ChatGPT has conversation branches. Or do I misunderstand?

Just edit a message and it’s a new branch.

In not aware of a feature to access the previous message versions after editing.
This is a big use-case for me that I've gotten used to while using Open-WebUI. Being able to easily branch conversations, edit messages with information from a few messages downstream to 'compact' the chat history, completely branch convos. They have a tree view, too, which works pretty well (the main annoyances are interface jumps that never seem to line up properly).

This feature has spoiled me from using most other interfaces, because it is so wasteful from a context perspective to need to continually update upstream assumptions while the context window stretches farther away from the initial goal of the conversation.

I think a lot more could be done with this, too - some sort of 'auto-compact' feature in chat interfaces which is able to pull the important parts of the last n messages verbatim, without 'summarizing' (since often in a chat-based interface, the specific user voicing is important and lost when summarized).

The web app has < and > icons to flip between different branches.

I don't see them on their mobile app though.

You can click the three dots on any response and click "Branch in new chat". Not sure when it was added but it exists.
Yeah I got corrected above. Good, but not good it took them 3 years.
This is a constant frustration for me with Gemini. Especially since things like Deep Research and Canvas mode lock you in, seemingly arbitrary. LLMs to my understanding are Markovian prompt-to-prompt, so I don't see why this is an issue at all.