Context window
Dated sources are over 18 months old; other dates are unknown.
Publication dates and source age
Sources counted: 3
Newest dated source: 2023-07-06
Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.
Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.
Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.
Open in the glossary Reading notes · Structured record
In plain language
The amount of information a model can work with in one request, measured in tokens. [1]
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Limits & distinctions
Fitting text into the window does not guarantee every detail will be used correctly. A 2023 study found that performance on its retrieval tasks depended on where information appeared. [3]
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A fuller explanation
The current context can include instructions, conversation history and supplied material. The context window limits how much can fit. Think of it as the material on the desk for the current task: a teaching analogy, not a description of human memory. [1] [2]
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How it relates to the map
Check this when asking an AI system to work with a long conversation or document. [1]
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https://theaiatlas.org/ideas/context-window/
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Image previews are summaries. Keep the page link so readers can check the evidence.
Sources and what we read
1. Machine Learning Glossary
Publication dates and source age
Sources counted: 1
Publication dates are unavailable.
Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.
Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.
Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.
Read the artificial intelligence, deep model, context window, inference and chat entries. Used for terminology, not product performance claims. Updated date follows the earlier displayed page date; initial publication is unspecified. The chat entry was reread during the same-day beginner-content review. Also read the generalization and compute entries.
2. Text generation
Publication dates and source age
Sources counted: 1
Publication dates are unavailable.
Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.
Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.
Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.
Read next-token generation, generation settings, temperature, sampling and prompt-format sections. Library options illustrate the process; defaults and suggested temperatures are not treated as universal chatbot behavior. Live page publication date unspecified.
3. Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts
Source is over 18 months old.
Publication dates and source age
Sources counted: 1
Newest dated source: 2023-07-06
Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.
Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.
Read the abstract and version history: position-dependent performance in multi-document question answering and key-value retrieval. Used to distinguish accepted context length from effective use of content, not to assign the same weakness to every current model.
Edition and machine-readable evidence
Content version 0.20.0. Evidence cutoff 2026-09-15; this does not mean every source was read on that day.
Pinned complete dataset · Complete evidence page · Agent consumption guide