Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A store of information held outside an assistant's conversation, of which only a core is loaded on opening, the rest being reached by designation at the moment it becomes necessary.
Full definition
In computing, "addressable memory" refers to a space in which every location carries an address allowing access to it without traversing the others.
In the articles on this blog, the term qualifies the memory of an AI-assisted working context, and it carries two simultaneous conditions. External: the material lives in storage that survives the conversation — a Google Spreadsheet, files on disk — and not in the exchange's history. Addressable: the assistant knows where each type of information sits and can go and fetch one precise piece, without the whole having to be reloaded.
The second condition is what makes the practical difference. An external store all of which has to be reread every session is an external memory, but not an addressable memory: its size eventually makes it unusable. Addressability therefore presupposes a structure known in advance — one tab per type of information, stable identifiers — and a loading rule that distinguishes the core from the rest.
Usage in the field
The term serves to describe what a context system supplies to an assistant: not a recall of everything that was said, but a place to go and fetch what becomes useful. It comes up in discussions about loading cost, about the structure of a store exposed to an agent, and about the difference between remembering and knowing where to find.
Synonyms and variants
Addressable external memory, addressable memory, persistent external memory. The short form "external memory" is used when persistence is enough for the argument and selective access is not at stake.
Not to be confused with
- Session memory — state kept for the duration of a conversation, lost when it closes. It is internal and volatile where this one is external and durable.
- Active memory — the share of information actually present in the model's context at a given moment. It is the result of a load; addressable external memory is what that load draws from.
- Context window — the maximum capacity of what the model can hold at once. It is the constraint that makes external memory necessary, not a form of memory.
- Persistence — the fact of keeping information outside the exchange. It is the condition for an external memory to exist, without saying how it is accessed afterwards.
Examples
A Context represented by a Google Spreadsheet: the tabs for mission, state, synthesis, tasks, decisions and contradictions load on opening; the raw sources, the atomic knowledge and the older deliverables stay in the Sheet and are read only when a question calls for them.
Ambiguities / debates
The word "memory" suggests automatic recall, like the feature of the same name offered by consumer assistants, which reinjects what it has retained of its own accord. Addressable external memory reinjects nothing: it is consulted. Both uses of the word coexist, and the one adopted here is the second.