Your model advertises a million-token context window. That number tells you what fits — not what the model can use. Here's what's really inside the window, why big context hurts, and four fixes.
Your model says it has a one-million-token context window. Its real working memory is a lot smaller than that.
On long-context benchmarks, models start failing well below the number printed on the box. And here's the part nobody warns you about: past a certain point, adding more context makes your answers worse. Not better. Worse.
Prefer to watch? Full walkthrough with the attention-cost animation:
A context window is not memory
Let's kill one idea first. A context window is not memory.
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What fits, what falls out, and why long conversations get weird.
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