Comment by dimitri-vs
12 hours ago
It's kind of like having a 16 gallon gas tank in your car versus a 4 gallon tank. You don't need the bigger one the majority of the time, but the range anxiety that comes with the smaller one and annoyance when you DO need it is very real.
It seems possible, say a year or two from now that context is more like a smart human with a “small”, vs “medium” vs “large” working memory. The small fellow would be able to play some popular songs on the piano , the medium one plays in an orchestra professionally and the x-large is like Wagner composing Der Ring marathon opera. This is my current, admittedly not well informed mental model anyway. Well, at least we know we’ve got a little more time before the singularity :)
It’s more like the size of the desk the AI has to put sheets of paper on as a reference while it builds a Lego set. More desk area/context size = able to see more reference material = can do more steps in one go. I’ve lately been building checklists and having the LLM complete and check off a few tasks at a time, compacting in-between. With a large enough context I could just point it at a PLAN.md and tell it to go to work.
Except after 4 gallons it might as well be pure oil, mucking everything up.