Your LLM Has Amnesia - And We Built the System That Keeps It That Way (or Almost According to a16z)
So a16z dropped a piece about continual learning last week, and I've been thinking about it obsessively since, in the way I used to think about the Transformer paper back in 2017 when I first read it three times in a row on a flight and arrived at my destination genuinely confused about what year it was.
The piece is good. Genuinely good. The Memento framing is a little overdone, but I'll forgive it because the underlying point is correct: we have built extraordinarily capable retrieval systems and dressed them up as something that learns. And I think most people in the industry know this and just don't say it out loud.
I want to dig into it — what they got right, what I think they're glossing over, and some things happening in the research literature right now that I haven't seen talked about enough.
"Retrieval is not learning....
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