What is Context Window?
TL;DR
The maximum amount of text an AI model can process at once, measured in tokens.
Context Window: Definition & Explanation
The context window refers to the maximum amount of text an LLM can reference and understand in a single processing session, measured in tokens. A larger context window enables tasks like summarizing long documents, analyzing large codebases, and maintaining extended conversation histories. For example, GPT-4o has a 128K-token context window, Claude 3.5 supports 200K tokens, and Gemini 1.5 Pro offers up to 1 million tokens. The size of the context window significantly impacts a model's practical usefulness, and when combined with RAG techniques, even more effective information processing becomes possible. However, larger context windows also increase processing costs, so efficient utilization is important.