What is Long Context?
TL;DR
The ability of LLMs to process extremely long inputs exceeding 1 million tokens at once. Enables analysis of entire books.
Long Context: Definition & Explanation
Long Context refers to an LLM's ability to handle a very large number of tokens (context window) in a single input. Google Gemini 1.5 Pro supports 1 million tokens (roughly equivalent to 7 books), and Anthropic Claude supports 200K tokens. This enables comprehensive analysis of lengthy documents, batch review of large codebases, summarization of extended meeting transcripts, and cross-document analysis. The Needle-in-a-Haystack test evaluates whether models can accurately locate specific information within a long context. Since large amounts of information can be input directly without RAG, long context capabilities can also simplify system architecture.