Comment by gwern
4 days ago
> I don't think you're going to find an LLM with a large enough context window to have a meaningfully involving story spanning multiple sessions.
First, you don't need much of any context window because you can finetune the LLM. Don't mistake specific engineering choices and tradeoffs and deployment convenience for intrinsic limitations of the technology.
Second, LLMs like Gemini now have context windows of millions of tokens, corresponding to millions of words. Seems like enough for 'multiple sessions'.
> An LLM isn't going to craft a story element tailored to a character, or more importantly, an individual player. It's not going to understand Sam couldn't make last week's session. An LLM also doesn't really understand the game rules and isn't going to be able to adjudicate house rules based on fun factor.
An LLM can do all of that, and you definitely do not know that they can't.
> They'll be no better a game master than a MadLibs book.
They've been better than a Madlibs book since AI Dungeon 1 which was like 6 years ago.
Have you actually used Gemini? I use it a lot for translation, and its context window is more like 150k tokens, rather than the 2M context window they say it has.
Be that as it may, long context window models which are good are not a mirage. By say late 2027, when the LLM providers figure out that they're using the wrong samplers, they will figure out how to get you 2 million output tokens per LLM call which stay coherent.