Driven by our mission of "uplifting the world with memory," this paper explores the design concept of "memory" that is essential for achieving artificial superintelligence (ASI). Rather than proposing novel methods, we focus on several alternative approaches whose potential benefits are widely imaginable, yet have remained largely unexplored. The currently dominant paradigm, which can be termed "extract then store," involves extracting information judged to be useful from experiences and saving only the extracted content. However, this approach inherently risks the loss of information, as some valuable knowledge particularly for different tasks may be discarded in the extraction process. In contrast, we emphasize the "store then on-demand extract" approach, which seeks to retain raw experiences and flexibly apply them to various tasks as needed, thus avoiding such information loss. In addition, we highlight two further approaches: discovering deeper insights from large collections of probabilistic experiences, and improving experience collection efficiency by sharing stored experiences. While these approaches seem intuitively effective, our simple experiments demonstrate that this is indeed the case. Finally, we discuss major challenges that have limited investigation into these promising directions and propose research topics to address them.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: STONE-based memory platform.
Figure 2: Pseudo-algorithms for the simplified experiment. sS(q) retrieves the memory entry relevant to q from storage S . fq(⋅) extracts information relevant to q . g(q∣⋅) generates an answer to q by referring to given information. retrieveext(q) retrieves documents relevant to q from the external database in the simplified experiment setting. More generally, this process corresponds to acquiring new experience.
Figure 3: STONE (store then on-demand extract) vs. extract then store.
Figure 4: Deeper insight discovery vs. simple experience replay.
Figure 5: With memory-sharing vs. without memory-sharing.
We proudly introduce Memory-as-Asset, a new memory paradigm towards human-centric artificial general intelligence (AGI). In this paper, we formally emphasize that human-centric, personal memory management is a prerequisite for complementing the collective knowledge of existing large language models (LLMs) and extending their knowledge boundaries through self-evolution. We introduce three key features that shape the Memory-as-Asset era: (1) Memory in Hand, which emphasizes human-centric ownership to maximize benefits to humans; (2) Memory Group, which provides collaborative knowledge formation to avoid memory islands, and (3) Collective Memory Evolution, which enables continuous knowledge growth to extend the boundary of knowledge towards AGI. We finally give a potential three-layer memory infrastructure to facilitate the Memory-as-Asset paradigm, with fast personal memory storage, an intelligent evolution layer, and a decentralized memory exchange network. Together, these components outline a foundational architecture in which personal memories become persistent digital assets that can be accumulated, shared, and evolved over time. We believe this paradigm provides a promising path toward scalable, human-centric AGI systems that continuously grow through the collective experiences of individuals and intelligent agents.
Yanqi Pan, Qinghao Huang, Weihao Yang
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Brachisto Ltd., Hong Kong
Current agentic memory systems (vector stores, retrieval-augmented generation, scratchpads, and context-window management) do not implement memory: they implement lookup. We argue that treating lookup as memory is a category error with provable consequences for agent capability, long-term learning, and security. Retrieval generalizes by similarity to stored cases; weight-based memory generalizes by applying abstract rules to inputs never seen before. Conflating the two produces agents that accumulate notes indefinitely without developing expertise, face a provable generalization ceiling on compositionally novel tasks that no increase in context size or retrieval quality can overcome, and are structurally vulnerable to persistent memory poisoning as injected content propagates across all future sessions. Drawing on Complementary Learning Systems theory from neuroscience, we show that biological intelligence solved this problem by pairing fast hippocampal exemplar storage with slow neocortical weight consolidation, and that current AI agents implement only the first half. We formalize these limitations, address four alternative views, and close with a co-existence proposal and a call to action for system builders, benchmark designers, and the memory community.
Binyan Xu, Xilin Dai, Kehuan Zhang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Memory-augmented LLM agents offer an appealing shortcut to continual learning: rather than updating model parameters, they accumulate experience in external memory, seemingly sidestepping the stability-plasticity dilemma of parametric learning. We show that this challenge does not disappear but resurfaces at the memory level. Under a limited context window, old and new experiences compete during retrieval, relocating the continual-learning bottleneck from parameter updates to memory access. To study this phenomenon, we introduce a (k,v) framework that disentangles two fundamental design axes of external memory: how experience is represented and how it is organized for retrieval. Across sequential-task experiments in ALFWorld and BabyAI, we find that abstract procedural memories transfer more reliably than detailed trajectories, while negative transfer disproportionately harms the hard cases. Moreover, finer-grained memory organization is not universally beneficial: designs that yield strong forward transfer can simultaneously induce severe forgetting. Together, these results reveal that external memory does not resolve the continual-learning problem; it reshapes it into a problem of memory representation and retrieval design.