What is a context window?
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Context window: All the text a language model can take into account at once when it answers, including the conversation, any fetched pages and its own reply.
Anthropic's documentation calls it the model's working memory, separate from what it learned in training, and measures it in tokens. Its documentation also notes that accuracy can drop as the context fills up.
Search results and fetched pages have to fit in that window, which is one reason an assistant works from snippets or the start of a page rather than every word. A page that answers in its first lines is easier to use.
Read next
- What is a token in AI?
- What is a large language model (LLM)?
- Why did ChatGPT read your page but not cite it?
Sources
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