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Context Window

Date of Addition

17 Oct 2025

The maximum number of tokens (words, subwords, or characters) that a language model can process simultaneously as input and maintain in working memory when generating responses. Context window size represents a fundamental technical constraint that determines an LLM's ability to reason over long documents, maintain conversation history, or incorporate retrieved information in RAG systems. Expansion of context windows from thousands to millions of tokens has become a key competitive dimension in LLM development, though larger windows incur quadratic computational costs and do not guarantee improved reasoning quality.

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