How does ChatGPT handle long context limitations and truncation?

ChatGPT uses a fixed context window and truncates or summarizes older tokens when limits are exceeded.

Transformers have a fixed maximum context length, meaning they can only attend to a limited number of tokens. When input exceeds this limit, older tokens are removed or compressed. Advanced systems may use sliding windows, retrieval augmentation, or summarization techniques to retain important information.

This limitation is fundamental to attention complexity, which scales quadratically with sequence length.