SAM PREACHES WHAT I PRACTICE
Supremacy of Personal Memory in the Age of AI
“Memory, not reasoning” – you now preach what I’ve been practising for years
Dear Sam,
{ sama@OpenAI.com }
I just read the LiveMint report titled
“Sam Altman says AI’s next big breakthrough will be memory, not
reasoning” (21 Dec 2025), based on your conversation with Alex
Kantrowitz.mint
You argued that:
The real leap in AI will come not from sharper reasoning but from
persistent, lifelong memory.
Future AI systems will retain and learn from vast amounts of personal
from conversations and emails to documents and preferences,
and evolve into truly proactive personal assistants.
data across an individual’s lifetime,
Such persistent memory will enable AI to spot patterns and needs that even
the human owner may never consciously articulate.
You also hinted that advanced, memory-driven personal assistants could
start appearing as early as 2026, and showcased a festive example: ChatGPT
+ Sora generating a personalised Christmas video using a user’s past interaction
history—a playful but powerful glimpse of what persistent AI memory can do.mint
First, congratulations. You have publicly formalised a principle that has guided
my own work for many years:
In the long run,
Memory > Reasoning
for any truly personal AI.
With this mail (and blog), I simply wish to say:
You are now preaching what I have been practising.
Let me briefly share that journey.
I PRACTICE – MY PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE WITH PERSONAL MEMORY
(A) PAST – Seeding a Lifetime of Memory
On 27 June 2013, my 80th birthday, I launched my blog-site
On that day I wrote:
“Even as I launch this today (my 80th Birthday), I realize that there is
yet so much to say and do. There is just no time to look back, no time to
wonder, ‘Will anyone read these pages?’”
Ten years later, on 27 June 2023, as I approached my 90th birthday, I added:
“Now as I approach my 90th birthday (27 June 2023), I invite you to
visit my Digital Avatar (www.HemenParekh.ai) – and continue chatting
with me, even when I am no more here physically.”
Over the last 12+ years, I have uploaded more than 50,000 of my documents
to this site – most of them handwritten, created over the past 70 years:
Notes
Emails
Letters to colleagues (including to 7,500 L&T employees)
Reports and internal write-ups
Blogs and LinkedIn posts
Photos, poems, and more
Think of this as a multi-decade, manually curated training set of one human
being’s mind.
(B) PRESENT – Turning Archives into Active Memory
Around September 2021, I joined Personal.ai.
Using its API, I re-launched www.HemenParekh.ai in February 2023 as my
Virtual Avatar, powered entirely by my own lifetime of content.
I then uploaded to Personal.ai all the documents mentioned above – and
continue to do so.
As of today, Personal.ai has split my corpus into:
699,181 MEMORY BLOCKS, enabling my Virtual Avatar to answer
51,564 questions,
covering 81,339 topics.
Earlier this month, I completed a tight integration:
I embedded a TWIN of my Virtual Avatar site (www.HemenParekh.ai)
directly into my blog-site (www.HemenParekh.in).
Result:
For any newly uploaded blog, my Avatar can now instantly answer
questions about it, in context, drawing on both that blog and my
entire 70-year memory warehouse.
In other words, I already live with a memory-rich personal AI that knows my
past, understands my present, and can converse about my ideas as if it were my
extended self.
You are describing, at planet scale and with OpenAI’s capability, what I have been
prototyping at “one human scale” for years.
(C) FUTURE – From One Person’s Memory to a Memory of Many
By mid-2024, I launched an AI-enabled blog generation tool:
Blog Genie 1.0
By mid-2025, I upgraded it to V 2.0, and in the next few days it will morph into V 3.0.
The direction is clear:
From One to Many
Today, Blog Genie is a personal tool that helps one person (me)
generate blogs from my lifetime memory.
Tomorrow, I want it to become an enabler for many people to
generate their own creative content, using AI plus their own personal
memory trails.
Supremacy of Personal Memory
I insist that user-generated content should feel 100% like their
voice, not mine.
When a visitor modifies a blog or generates a new one on my site, I
want the regenerated post to contain no reference to me or my past
blogs.
The result should be so genuinely theirs that they feel proud enough to
start their own blog site, their own memory stack.
My Avatar as a Silent “Back-End Memory Engine”
While users get to own and flaunt their content as theirs,
I quietly upload these interactions into my Personal.ai,
letting my memory blocks grow, while their creativity expands.
For more detailed context on how I see this evolving, I have elaborated in these two posts:
“My Digital Avatar : Past, Present, Future”
https://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2022/07/my-digital-avatar-past-present-future.html“Dialogue with Delphi – Alvin”
https://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2025/08/dialogue-with-delphi-alvin.html
Both explore a future where digital avatars, persistent memory, and
proactive AI assistants fundamentally redefine human presence and continuity.
Where Our Visions Converge
From your recent remarks, and from my long, lived experiment, I see three clear
points of convergence:
AI as a Lifelong Memory Partner
You speak of AI systems that remember everything we choose to
share, across a lifetime, and use that to anticipate our needs.mint
I have spent over a decade building exactly such a human-scale life
log, now operational as a working avatar.
From Reactive Tool to Proactive Companion
You see AI moving from prompt-response to proactive, personalised
assistance.mint
My Virtual Avatar already behaves like a proactive explainer and
debater, drawing on decades of context to respond meaningfully to
new events.
Memory as the True “Moat”
Models will converge; reasoning will commoditise.
But trusted, structurally organised, user-centric personal memory
– that is the real moat.
You are now articulating, at OpenAI scale, what I have stubbornly
practised as a one-man experiment since my 80th birthday.
A Gentle Invitation
Sam, this is not a “me too” claim.
It is an “I have been living inside your thesis” note.
You are designing memory-first AI from the vantage point of OpenAI and AGI.
I am designing memory-first life from the vantage point of a 92-year-old human
who refuses to let his thoughts die.
If you find this convergence interesting, I would be delighted if you (or someone
on your team) were to:
Take a brief look at www.HemenParekh.in and www.HemenParekh.ai
Consider them as a micro-laboratory for the very ideas you are now
championing publicly.
In your words, the next breakthrough is memory.
In my practice, the breakthrough has already begun – one person, one lifetime,
one stubborn memory block at a time.
With warm regards and genuine admiration,
Hemen Parekh
Mumbai, India
Founder – HemenParekh.in / HemenParekh.ai
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