An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents

Chapter 4. Memory

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 4th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Among all the added modules to the augmented LLM, memory is a key component needed to go from an LLM to an agent. By themselves, LLMs are forgetful entities; they do not remember past conversations, nor do they have access to all actions they have taken. If you were to locally load up an LLM and ask it to remember your name, it can’t–not without explicitly giving it memory. In contrast, the interactions that you might have with hosted LLMs, like ChatGPT and Claude, are not regular LLMs. Rather, they are LLMs augmented with modules like memory and tools. Figure 4-1 illustrates this forgetfulness well, as it demonstrates the interaction you might have with a regular LLM. As such, LLMs are stateless, and information is not persisted across calls.

Figure 4-1. LLMs without any additional processing are forgetful and will not remember information between sessions

Over the years, ...