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by teraflop 16 days ago
I started reading this and right away hit something that doesn't really make any sense to me:

> the extractor. the thing that reads conversation transcripts and decides what to keep.

> the most consequential choice an extractor makes is timing. extract eagerly, after every message, and you spend tokens on small talk that goes nowhere. extract lazily, at the end of a session, and the context you needed to resolve a pronoun is already gone.

If the input is coming from a transcript, then either that transcript contains enough context to understand what a particular pronoun refers to, or it doesn't.

If it does, why would waiting until the end of a session be a problem? What am I missing?

1 comments

good catch - the example is sloppy. the real issue is lost-in-the-middle on long transcripts: the extracting model attends worse to material between endpoints, so "the transcript is still there" doesn't mean the extraction sees it equally.
separate tradeoff worth naming - do you want "memories" available within session vs after the conversation has ended? that was what i was trying to convey in this paragraph