Bilt’s collaboration with Letta is part of a broader push to give AI the ability to store and recall useful information, which could make chatbots smarter and agents less error-prone. Memory remains underdeveloped in modern AI, which undermines the intelligence and reliability of AI tools, according to experts I spoke to.
Harrison Chase, cofounder and CEO of LangChain, another company that has developed a method for improving memory in AI agents, says he sees memory as a vital part of context engineering—wherein a user or engineer decides what information to feed into the context window. LangChain offers companies several different kinds of memory storage for agents, from long-term facts about users to memories of recent experiences. “Memory, I would argue, is a form of context,” Chase says. “A big portion of an AI engineer’s job is basically getting the model the right context [information].”
Consumer AI tools are gradually becoming less forgetful, too. This February, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT will store relevant information in order to provide a more personalized experience for users—although the company did not disclose how this works.
Letta and LangChain make the process of recall more transparent to engineers building AI systems.
“I think it’s super important not only for the models to be open but also for the memory systems to be open,” says Clem Delangue, CEO of the AI hosting platform Hugging Face and an investor in Letta.
Intriguingly, Letta’s CEO Packer hints that it might also be important for AI models to learn what to forget. “If a user says, ‘that one project we were working on, wipe it out from your memory’ then the agent should be able to go back and retroactively rewrite every single memory.”
The notion of artificial memories and dreams makes me think of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a mind-bending novel that inspired the stylishly dystopian movie Blade Runner. Large language models aren’t yet as impressive as the rebellious replicants of the story, but their memories, it seems, can be just as fragile.
Update: 8/22/2025, 1:20 PM EDT: WIRED has clarified to whom Bilt provides deals.
This is an edition of Will Knight’s AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.