An interactive explainer

The fact was in the prompt the whole time. It read right past it.

A context window is not memory and not storage. It is a budget you spend again from zero on every call. Past a point, adding more text you actually need makes the answer worse — because attention is divided among everything you sent, and the middle of a long prompt is the part the model reads least.

Context windows · Prompt engineering · Lost in the middle

AI & Machine Learning · Intermediate · 9 min · Why sending the model more can make the answer worse — an interactive explainer on ViLearn, with a simulation and a knowledge check. All explainers.

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