Context Collapse
Why your AI forgets what it just said — and how to stop it
At first, your AI tool seems brilliant. It handles user questions, continues the conversation naturally, and even references earlier parts of the chat. But then… it slips. It repeats itself. It forgets something the user said just two steps ago. Or worse — it contradicts itself entirely. Welcome to one of the most common and frustrating AI limitations: context collapse.
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 or Claude operate within a defined context window — a fixed token limit (i.e., a cap on how much “conversation” they can remember). For GPT-4-turbo, this is currently around 128,000 tokens — which seems large, but that’s the max size of both prompt and response combined. For many real-world use cases, especially in multi-turn conversations or long documents, that space fills up fast.
Once the window is full, older messages get trimmed or dropped. And when that happens, the model forgets — because it literally no longer has access to that part of the conversation. The result? Confused outputs, repeated questions, and broken logic that damages user trust.
In enterprise settings — where users expect continuity and professionalism — these moments can kill credibility. A legal AI tool forgetting clause 5.2? A sales assistant repeating a price already quoted? That’s not just annoying, it’s a deal-breaker.
To handle context collapse, you need to build a memory strategy outside the model itself. Here are the common approaches:
As the conversation grows, periodically summarise past messages into a concise format and feed that back into the prompt. This maintains continuity without overloading the token window
Use embeddings (e.g., from OpenAI or Cohere) to convert past interactions into searchable vectors. Retrieve only the most relevant history based on the current query — this is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Create a token-budgeting system to include only the most recent or relevant messages. This is especially useful in real-time apps where performance matters.
Maintain state in your application — know what the user has done, what actions have been triggered, and what should persist across sessions.
LLMs don’t forget because they’re flawed — they forget because they’re capped. And if you don’t engineer memory into your AI app, that forgetfulness becomes your problem. The good news? With the right architecture, you can maintain conversational continuity and scale with confidence.
Need help building AI that remembers what matters? AndMine has solved this across multiple enterprise platforms — let’s make your AI smarter, longer.
