Glossary
Context window
The amount of text an AI model can hold in mind at once. Go past it and the model starts forgetting the earliest parts of the conversation.
A context window is the model's short-term memory - the total amount of text it can consider at one time, including your instructions, any documents you paste in, and its own replies so far. Once a conversation grows past that limit, the oldest parts fall out of view and the model can no longer refer to them.
Why it matters for business
It explains why a long chat can start to drift or contradict itself, and why pasting a whole handbook into a single message sometimes works and sometimes does not. For big tasks, feeding the model only the relevant parts - or using retrieval to pull in the right pieces on demand - beats dumping everything in at once.
Rule of thumb
If an AI seems to forget something you said earlier, the conversation has likely outgrown its context window. Start a fresh chat and restate what matters.Keep reading
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