Context Window
Working knowledgeCore AI Concepts
The context window is the total volume of data a model can process at one time. Exceed the limit and earlier data is dropped, so the model loses the beginning of a document or forgets instructions given at the start of a session. A large context window allows a model to take in an entire contract and reason across the whole thing at once.
In practice
The context window sets both what a system can do in one pass and what it costs, because you pay for what you put into it. A supplier promising analysis of long documents should be asked what happens when a document exceeds the window: truncated, split into chunks, or retrieved selectively. Each answer produces a different quality of output.