Overcoming the 8,000 words limit of ChatGPT conversations, a developer with username gfodor on Twitter, has introduced ‘Shogtongue’, a new language for getting around the word count to continue conversations. What might sound freaky, is actually a compressed language that can be used as a prompt later for compressing long conversations. 

Essentially, this works like accessing the history, picking up where you left off. If users input the same prompt in the chat again, it will replicate the previous conversation. This feature enables you to continue the previous conversation and go beyond the word limit or what some people call the ‘memory problem’ of ChatGPT.

Jeremy Nguyen, an AI researcher, explained on Twitter, about how exactly the algorithm works. 

Users ask ChatGPT to compress the entire conversation into a minimum number of tokens. With more instructions, this can be compressed into a single prompt, that when entered into a new chat, can recreate the entire conversation without exceeding the 8k word limit. 

This technique is still a work in progress. Even after users enter the prompt, it is important to give the context to let ChatGPT interpret what exactly the entered prompt means. 

It is important to note that this works only with GPT-4 and struggles with GPT-4 API as well. This technique does not work on ChatGPT running on GPT-3.5 model. 

During initial testing, Bing Chat by Microsoft engaged in arguments with humans due to its obvious errors, leading Microsoft to limit the conversation history. It’s unclear whether utilizing Shogtongue would result in comparable states of confusion with ChatGPT. 

However, Microsoft has enhanced GPT-4 since its launch, which has enabled them to expand Bing Chat’s memory. Therefore, it might not be an issue to engage in extended conversations with AI chatbots that utilize GPT-4.

On similar lines, AI chatbots developing their own language is not a new phenomenon. In 2017, a similar incident occurred when two Facebook’s chatty AI robots started talking to each other in their own language, and had to be shut down. The same year, Google claimed that its Translate tool had the capability to generate its own language. OpenAI too attests to that, saying, AI can indeed be encouraged to create its own language. Recently, a developer also made ChatGPT and Bing AI have a conversation.