This episode addresses the physical and mathematical limits of a model’s "short-term memory." We explore the context window and the engineering trade-offs required to process long documents. You will learn about the quadratic cost of attention where doubling the input length quadruples the computational work and why this creates a massive bottleneck for long-form reasoning. We also introduce the architectural tricks like Flash Attention that allow us to push these limits further. By the end, you will understand why context is the most expensive real estate in the generative stack.
