Context Length
Domain: LLM Concepts
🎯 Motivation
The maximum number of tokens the model can process in a single request (input + output). Larger context enables longer documents but costs more.
📋 Concrete Example
A 128K context model can process a 300-page book in one prompt. A 4K context model can only handle about 10 pages. Cost scales with tokens used, so long contexts are expensive.
🔗 Analogy
The size of a whiteboard - a small whiteboard (short context) fits a few equations. A wall-sized whiteboard (long context) fits an entire lesson plan. Bigger is more capable but costs more (more markers used).