Long context is also a boost for collective intelligence as well. If you assume the average corporate document—a press release, or marketing plan, or minutes from a board meeting—is a few thousand words long, then today’s models can simultaneously hold in their short-term memory close to a thousand documents. A state-of-the-art language model with the ability to instantly recall and generate insights from the most important thousand documents in the history of a company would possess knowledge about that company that would rival that of any single employee, even the CEO. It seems inevitable that anyone trying to make a multi-faceted decision about the future of an organization would want to at least consult such a model. […]
In a matter of years, I suspect it will seem bizarre to draft the specs for a new feature or a company initiative or a grant proposal without asking for feedback from a long-context model grounded in the organization’s history.