CHAPTER 07 · Glossary: Foundational Modelling · 15 / 27
Context window
The context window is the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can consider at once. It is the model's working memory. If a model has a context window of 8,000 tokens, it can "see" roughly 6,000 words of conversation or document at a time; anything beyond that has to be dropped or summarized.
Larger context windows let a model handle longer documents and remember more of a conversation. Expanding the context window is a major area of research, and it is exactly the problem that the Recursive Language Models paper in folder 02 tackles.