Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a robot reading a book. (credit: Benj Edwards / Stable Diffusion)
On Thursday, AI company Anthropic announced it has given its ChatGPT-like Claude AI language model the ability to analyze an entire book's worth of material in under a minute. This new ability comes from expanding Claude's context window to 100,000 tokens, or about 75,000 words.
Like OpenAI's GPT-4, Claude is a large language model (LLM) that works by predicting the next token in a sequence when given a certain input. Tokens are fragments of words used to simplify AI data processing, and a "context window" is similar to short-term memory—how much human-provided input data an LLM can process at once.
A larger context window means an LLM can consider larger works like books or participate in very long interactive conversations that span "hours or even days," according to Anthropic: