← All terms
Models
Context window
The maximum number of tokens a model can process in one request.
Frontier models in 2026 commonly support 200k-2M token context windows. Larger windows do not eliminate the need for retrieval — quality of long-context recall degrades meaningfully past 50-100k tokens, costs scale linearly, and latency scales worse than linearly. Treat context window as a soft constraint, not a license to dump everything.
Building with Context window?
We ship production AI systems built around concepts like this every quarter. Send a brief and get a written proposal in 48 hours.
Send a brief →