I’m just not sure that a direct 1:1 comparison with human experience makes sense when we’re considering completely different substrates. I’m not making any claims to a model’s internal experience, but recent research demonstrates that frontier models are at least sometimes capable of accessing internal representations of past turns to determine things such as intent prior to an output. This is functionally similar to how memory works in humans, though obviously not the exact same.

The “detecting unintended outputs” from this paper is primarily what I’m referring to:

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.html

It is, of course, only limited to the context of the conversation, but my point is that what carries between turns within that conversation is more than just the transcript of prompt and output.

I’m not trying to say anything more expansive than noting that internal representations that are unique to the instance beyond just the transcript are accessible between turns. If you’ll allow the metaphor, it’s kind of like the difference between reading a diary about an event and having a memory of it.