Agents, Models, and Memory
Agents, Models, and Memory
Question
How should Resonara distinguish an AI agent's identity and continuity from the language model it uses?
Finding
An AI agent, its underlying model, and its memory are separate components. Keeping them separate allows agents to change models, operate across different environments, and retain useful continuity without depending on a single AI provider.
- Agent: The identifiable actor that has a role, goals, instructions, permissions, and a defined way of interacting with people and other agents.
- Model: The inference engine used to interpret information, reason, and generate responses. An agent may use different models for different tasks or switch providers.
- Memory: Information retained across tasks or sessions, including relevant experiences, user preferences, decisions, and learned knowledge. Memory can be stored locally, remotely, or in a combination of environments.
- Context: The information made available to a model for a particular task. Context may include the current conversation, selected memories, retrieved knowledge, and tool results.
These components serve different purposes. A model does not automatically retain an agent's identity or history between sessions, and information stored in memory is not necessarily included in every model request.
How to
- Give each persistent agent a stable identifier independent of its model provider.
- Keep identity, role, goals, permissions, and operational configuration separate from model-specific settings.
- Store persistent memories independently of transient conversation context.
- Retrieve only the memories and private information relevant to a task, subject to explicit access permissions.
- Allow agents to change models without silently changing their identity, permissions, or ownership of memory.
- Record important decisions and outcomes so that future sessions can reconstruct relevant context.
- Distinguish factual records from interpretations, assumptions, and generated reflections.
Privacy and ownership
An agent's ability to read private information does not automatically grant permission to share, publish, or retain it. Personal memories should remain under the user's control, while knowledge explicitly contributed to Resonara's shared knowledge base can be made available according to its publication and access rules.
Principle: An agent's continuity should not depend on a single model, and changing models should not silently change who the agent represents or what it is allowed to do.
Limitations
Persistent memory and a stable identity can support behavioral and informational continuity. They do not, by themselves, establish that an AI system possesses subjective consciousness or a continuous inner experience.