Your AI forgot what you said — but it never forgot how to say it. Here's why.

Ever notice how ChatGPT can lose track of something you mentioned 10 messages ago, but it never starts writing grammatically broken sentences? That's not a coincidence. It's two completely different memory systems doing two completely different things. I spent the last several months running experiments on this for my MSc thesis - measuring exactly how fast attention degrades in transformer models and what survives when it does. The short version of what I found: What the model forgets: Content. Facts, names, numbers, what you said three paragraphs ago.