[Post Reply] I Hear You and I Raise You: The AI Memory Wars Have Only Just Begun
A response to Saanya Ojha's engaging (and smart) post about the goldfish problem and why the solution is bigger than any of us imagined
See: https://substack.com/home/post/p-164813598
Saanya, I read your post about AI's goldfish memory with the kind of recognition that makes you wonder if someone's been reading your digital diary. You've captured the absurd ritual we all perform—teaching the same context to different AIs like we're perpetually introducing ourselves at the world's most repetitive networking event.
But your vision of a portable memory vault raises a question: what happens when we solve the memory problem but accidentally create an even bigger coordination challenge?
Let me paint you a picture of where this rabbit hole leads.
The Orchestration Problem You Didn't See Coming
Here's the thing about persistent memory: once your AI actually remembers you, it's going to want to act on that knowledge. And that's where things get interesting.
Picture this scenario in 2027: You tell your AI assistant, "I need to prepare for next week's board presentation." Instead of asking you to explain your role, your company, and your presentation style for the hundredth time, it already knows. But now it needs to coordinate a symphony of actions across multiple platforms and AI models to actually help you.
It might need Claude's philosophical reasoning and one specific project’s context for framing strategic concepts, GPT-4's structured thinking and ideas from a chat last year in March or maybe it was May for slide organization, Midjourney's visual creativity for diagrams, and Perplexity's research capabilities for competitive analysis. All while maintaining perfect context about your personal presentation style, your company's recent challenges, and your boss's pet peeves.
Your memory vault suddenly needs to become something closer to a diplomatic embassy— let’s call it Switzerland — a neutral territory that can coordinate conversations across hostile AI territories without any of them knowing the others exist.
The Agent Access Revolution
You touched on something profound when you mentioned being locked into platforms. But here's where it gets spicy: agent-based access is about to blow up the entire API gatekeeping model.
LinkedIn doesn't want to give you your data through an API? Fine. Your AI agent logs in as you, browses your connections, and builds its own model of your professional network. Netflix being stingy with viewing history? Your agent screen-scrapes your "Continue Watching" list faster than you can say "password manager integration."
As AI agents become more reliable, they'll be able to access any tool you can access—even when companies actively try to block them. The question isn't whether this is technically possible (it absolutely is), but whether it's the future we want.
Why Foundation Model Companies Can't Win This Game
You nailed the fundamental conflict: OpenAI building your memory layer would be like McDonald's offering to store all your food preferences. Sure, they might give you better burgers, but good luck eating anywhere else without starting from digital scratch.
The economics are brutally simple. Foundation model companies make money through stickiness and lock-in. A truly neutral memory layer commoditizes their advantage and makes switching costs approach zero. They have about as much incentive to build this as oil companies have to build electric vehicle charging networks.
But here's the beautiful irony: the fragmentation of the AI landscape creates the perfect opportunity for a neutral player. When Claude excels at reasoning, GPT-5 dominates at coding, and Midjourney owns visual creativity, users desperately need someone to orchestrate them effectively.
The Enterprise Goldmine Hiding in Plain Sight
While you're focused on personal use (understandably—the goldfish problem is real), there's an even juicier B2B angle here.
Imagine selling this to enterprises with a pitch like: "When employees leave, their institutional knowledge doesn't have to."
Companies could maintain business-context memory that outlives individual employees while ensuring personal memories remain portable. The departing marketing manager's campaign strategies stay with the company, but her personal work style and career conversations travel with her to the next job.
This solves the massive knowledge transfer problem that costs enterprises billions annually when experienced employees leave. Suddenly you're not just a productivity tool—you're essential business infrastructure.
The Technical Architecture Challenge
You want the real technical breakdown? You're not just building a database with an API. You're constructing what amounts to a personal operating system for the AI age.
The core architecture needs at least four components:
The Memory Vault: Not file storage—a living knowledge graph that understands relationships between your preferences, goals, and experiences. Every conversation becomes part of your evolving digital DNA.
The Context Assembler: An AI agent that understands which pieces of your vast personal history matter for any given conversation. Like having a brilliant assistant who's read every email you've ever sent and somehow knows exactly which three facts to mention during budget planning.
The Platform Orchestrator: The Switzerland part—a diplomatic system that speaks fluent Claude, GPT, Gemini, and whatever emerges next month. It routes conversations and maintains state across platforms.
The Privacy Governor: The bouncer at the club of your personal data, making real-time decisions about what to share with which AI based on context and your evolving comfort levels.
The MCP (Model Context Protocol) emergence makes this more feasible—imagine unified access to calendars, email, documents, and social platforms through standardized connections.
Open Source or Die
Is this closed or open source? Not out of ideological purity, but as the only viable competitive strategy?
Think about 1Password and LastPass. They succeeded against tech giants not because their technology was superior, but because users trusted their incentive alignment. They made money by protecting passwords, not exploiting them.
They are “companies.” But an open-source play in this space could make a lot of sense.
A determined team could build a functional prototype in 6-9 months using existing building blocks—personal data warehouses, AI orchestration tools like LangChain, and API connections to major platforms. The hard part isn't the technology; it's the user experience design.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Convenience
Here's where your analogy gets uncomfortably accurate. Most people use the browser's built-in password manager not because it's better, but because it's already there. Convenience usually trumps capability.
Your memory layer needs to be so transparently valuable that using AI without it feels like browsing the web without search engines. That's a high bar, but not impossible.
The key insight: you're not competing with existing memory solutions—you're competing with human tendency to accept "good enough" rather than invest in "dramatically better."
Why This Matters More Than Either of Us Realized
If someone succeeds at building this, they don't just solve the goldfish problem. They fundamentally shift the balance of power in the AI ecosystem from platforms back to users. They turn AI models into commodities and personal context into the real competitive advantage.
That's not just a product—it's a movement. And movements, when they work, tend to create rather large economic opportunities.
The question isn't whether it's technically feasible (it absolutely is), but whether it gets built by someone aligned with user interests or someone trying to create the ultimate lock-in mechanism.
Because you're absolutely right about one thing: Big Tech's next move is obvious and terrifying. Google will connect your Gmail, Calendar, Photos, and Search history seamlessly integrate with Gemini, creating a memory system so comprehensive that switching to any other AI would feel like digital lobotomy.
But, other systems will still be able to access that memory.
The Window Is Now
So yes, build your Switzerland. Build it open source initially. Build it with obsessive focus on user control and data portability. Build it before the tech giants deliver what they're missing and try to co-opt the entire category.
Because you're absolutely right: we all deserve better than going on first dates with our own data.
Yours in digital liberation,
Tom
P.S. - I got the reference. And also went to Wharton. Nice to e-meet you.
[Original post by Saanya Ojha: "Escaping the Possessive Amnesiac"]