Why Does AI Gets Less Intelligent in Long Chats?
Why Does AI Gets Less Intelligent in Long Chats? The surprising science behind model memory, context limits, and cognitive drift As conversations with AI models stretch longer, users consistently report a decline in response quality. Answers become repetitive, less contextually aware, or surprisingly off-topic. This isn’t user perception bias—it’s a fundamental limitation of how transformer-based language models process and maintain conversational context. The Technical Reality: Token Limits and Attention Mechanisms Modern AI models operate within fixed context windows —hard limits on how much text they can process simultaneously. GPT-4 handles roughly 8,000-32,000 tokens (depending on version), while Claude can process up to 200,000 tokens. Once these limits are reached, the model employs truncation strategies, typically removing the oldest information to make room for new input. This creates a sliding window effect . Imagine reading a book but only being able to see the cu...