How Big Is an AI Agent's Working Memory?

Garry Tan says an AI agent's working memory can already hold about a thousand pages, roughly three Harry Potter books, and pull any page, fact, or event from that stack. A person can keep track of only seven plus or minus three things at once. The mistake he names is treating AI as chat. An agent is far larger than a chat window, and Y Combinator is starting to rebuild the way the firm operates around one.

Straylight, an internal AI agent, has a personality and a company brain: the total context of every founder Y Combinator has backed, anyone who has ever emailed the firm, and all the applications. He walked through the scale with his 11-year-old. The agent can find a needle in that haystack, then synthesize and work with what it finds. In another year the stack inside an agent will be five Harry Potter books, or 10, or 20, and the set of work it can operate on will be even bigger.

An agent he uses has read all of his email, all of his Dropbox, and all of his Apple Notes, including therapy notes going back 20 years. About 15 minutes before the conversation, it downloaded and transcribed the top 10 podcasts of the person he was about to meet, then went line by line and timestamp by timestamp to pull out major themes.