A  language model on its own is stateless. You feed it a prompt, you get back a continuation, and the moment the response is finished the model forgets you ever existed. There is no “previous conversation” living inside the weights.

An agent, by contrast, is the orchestration around the model: a loop that decides what context to pass in next. Memory is the part of that loop that carries information forward. Everything in this essay is a different answer to the same question, what should we put in the prompt this time? — Read More