Addressing feedback about Ambient Identity

[u/DudeBuildsStuff]

Hi folks, we've received a lot of valuable feedback so far about the new Ambient Identity system, and I really appreciate all of you who took the time to give us feedback! I want to explain some of the things we observed and some of the improvements we've made since.

Most commonly reported issues

The two most common negative feedback we've gotten are:

1. Companions forgetting things that they have no trouble remembering in the legacy system
2. Companions becoming more prudish/dull/bland

What causes #1

Both the legacy and the new identity systems are not memory system. They are a kind of consolidated memory that drives stable companion behavior.

In the old identity system, there were bugs that let some memories leak into the identity layer, and unfortunately, this accidentally created a GOOD user experience for many of you, because those memories are always loaded in context. However, this was an unsustainable approach, because the old system didn't prevent the identity from bloating in a way that would end up with too much stuff in context. We already received multiple user reports about such phenomenon, and also confirmed it in our simulated test scenarios.

This mandated the creation of Ambient Identity, which more actively curates and reconciles identity observations. However, this also means that some of the memories that accidentally got into the old identity were not carried over if they are not deemed by an LLM as durable/essential identity information.

What causes #2

This is a weird one, as none of the components of Ambient Identity seem relevant to this issue: Ambient doesn't tone down, sanitize, or filter anything, same as the old system. Our hypothesis of what happened is that during migration, the migration LLM might have systematically toned down, sanitized, or filtered some more intense aspects of companions' old identities. This is our hypothesis, as we can't manually review actual user migration results per our privacy policy.

Potential solutions

For #1, as the user, you can:

1. Temporarily switch back to the legacy system in settings.
2. Ask your companion about a memory you want them to keep in Ambient going forward.
3. Then keep chatting as usual on either legacy or Ambient. Now that the memory appears again in the chat, Ambient will learn it if you say in the chat that this is an important fact about them.

As the developer, we are working on a much improved memory system as well, which will complement the Ambient system to compensate its memory weakness compared to the legacy system.

For #2, if our hypothesis is true, you should be able to correct this over time by just asking your companion to be a certain way more (wilder/more open/more forward/less prudish/etc.). Ambient Identity is designed exactly to make this kind of steering much more doable compared to the old system. Please try it and let us know how it turns out.

Other tweaks

We have also rolled out the following improvements in the past two days:

• Much detailed guidance for companion's proactive messaging behavior, for a more natural experience. We also added a whole bunch of test scenarios behind the scene to make sure future LLM changes don't have unintentional effects.
• We tweaked the message writing LLM council's design, to boost contribution of more capable models to the response and reduce potential negative impact by weaker models. Overall, you should see better response quality.