What is a context window—and why does it matter?

A large context window in Large Language Models (LLMs) allows for longer and more coherent conversations by providing the model with more information to process. However, this also increases costs as processing time scales quadratically with token length. While a larger context window can reduce hallucinations and improve accuracy, it's not a guarantee of better outputs if the input data is low-quality or irrelevant. The key is finding a balance between quality and quantity in the prompt. LLMs like Gemini, GPT-4o, o1, and Claude have varying context windows, with some models having much larger capacities than others. As AI models continue to evolve, context length may become less of an issue as other factors such as speed and efficiency come into play.