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Long Context

AI models capable of processing very large amounts of text in a single prompt.

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Definition

Long context refers to AI models that can handle extended input lengths, from hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens.

Context Window Evolution: - GPT-3 (2020): 4K tokens - GPT-4 (2023): 128K tokens - Claude 3 (2024): 200K tokens - Gemini 1.5 (2024): 1M+ tokens

Enabling Technologies: - Efficient attention mechanisms - Positional encoding improvements - Memory optimization - Sparse attention patterns

Use Cases: - Entire codebase analysis - Book-length document Q&A - Long meeting transcripts - Multi-document synthesis

Challenges: - Compute cost scales with length - "Lost in the middle" phenomenon - Retrieval may still outperform

Examples

Uploading an entire novel to Claude and asking it to identify all plot inconsistencies.

Related Terms

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

A technique combining information retrieval with text generation to improve accuracy.

Token

The basic unit of text that language models process, roughly 3/4 of a word.

Context Window

The maximum amount of text a language model can process at once.

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