Generative AI & LLMs beginner

Context Window

The maximum number of tokens a model can consider at once — prompt, documents, and its own answer combined.

The context window is the model’s working memory for a single request. Everything must fit: system prompt, chat history, attached files, and the response. Exceed it and the earliest content is dropped or the call fails. Note that a large window is not the same as good recall inside it — models still lose track of the middle.

In practice: A 200K window holds roughly a 500-page book — but the answer must fit in there too.

Where this comes up