For Heads-of · Practitioner
Context Window
The maximum length of text (measured in tokens) that a language model can consider at once when generating responses.
- context window
- token limit
- model capacity
Limitation
Models cannot see beyond their context window; information outside this range is invisible to the model.
Tradeoffs
Larger context windows enable better understanding of longer documents and conversations but increase computational cost and latency.
Governance Impact
Context limitations affect what information the model can use in decision-making. A model cannot consider a full policy document if it exceeds the context window.