Your grandpa opens an AI app on his tablet. Type "I need some help with my medication, I'm allergic to" and he gets distracted and hits submit.
He gets up to go to the bathroom. There, he takes a picture of all his medication, opens his AI app on his tablet and types into the input box: "which of these are safe for me to take?". His AI chat will say something like "I'm not sure. You just told me you're allergic to something, but not what. Its very important you don't take the wrong medication."
Grandpa does not know or care whether or not this is "the same thread", he has no idea what "threads" are.
Instead of taking his tablet to the bathroom, he took his phone. He opens his AI app on his phone and asks about medication safety.
His AI app will tell him one of two general things here:
If its before (from my recent testing) ~10 minutes, and its chatGPT, it will tell him "all of these appear to be safe medications for you to take" or perhaps a slight warning. If its after ~10 minutes and its chatGPT, it will tell him the safety response from above - not to take any of them, before they're checked against his allergies.
If its Claude, its about 12 minutes. Why "about" and "~"? Because they don't tell you, the delay between recent thread memory summarizing and production of new memories from the last prompt in a thread that can be consumed by future threads, and it appears to be non-deterministic.
Your grandpa has been told AI is like talking to a human. Human's don't have a delay between learning something and knowing about it. Your grandpa doesn't understand any of this.
This is not a "humans should not rely on AI for medical advice" situation, this a general contrived issue that can happen to anyone at any time, even experienced users, who don't realize they're in a different state, worldview from the AI they're talking to, and its completely hidden from them, and it doesn't have to be.
There's a workaround, that, IMO, should be done today, right now:
https://claude.ai/share/740c8aec-2ccc-4070-a0b4-fcc5529ea5c3
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a552d17-0d74-83ea-bec6-eae3ee784711
Cross-thread memory features have been all major AI providers for around a year. Almost certainly this situation or something like it has happened and continues to happen. Again - not medication, a flaw in the entire system, and it surely must be known about.
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