Core Concepts
Context Window
Definition
The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) that a language model can consider at once. This includes both the input prompt and the generated output. Larger context windows allow the model to process longer documents and maintain longer conversations.
In Plain English
The AI's short-term memory. A bigger context window means the AI can read longer documents or remember more of your conversation. If you paste a 100-page document, you need a model with a large enough context window to read it all.