Why large language models struggle with long contexts

In 2017, Google published “Attention Is All You Need,” one of the most important papers in the history of machine learning. Building on the work of Bahdanau and his colleagues, Google researchers dispensed with the RNN and its hidden states. Instead, Google’s model used an attention mechanism to scan previous words for relevant context.

those documents—often, searching in a vector database—is not very sophisticated. If the user asks a complicated or confusing question, there’s a good chance the RAG system will retrieve the wrong documents and the chatbot will return the wrong answer.

LLMs absorb superhuman quantities of information at training time.