The Context Window Is Becoming a Virtual Machine
5 days ago
- #AI
- #Virtual Machine
- #Context Management
- The context window in AI is evolving into a virtual machine, not a graph as previously thought.
- Context management is a resource allocation problem, not a graph traversal issue, requiring operating system-like solutions.
- Performance degrades significantly when context utilization exceeds 60%, leading to attention thrashing.
- Summarization in context windows acts as garbage collection, compressing information for efficient memory use.
- Context windows are becoming addressable, with different regions serving specific functions like memory segmentation.
- Multi-agent systems resemble thread scheduling and work queues, with orchestrators acting as schedulers.
- Cache coherence is a critical but often overlooked issue in multi-agent systems, similar to distributed systems.
- Persistence in context windows is achieved through external systems like RAG and vector databases, akin to filesystems.
- The AI industry is reinventing operating system concepts under new names, such as 'context graphs' and 'decision traces'.
- Applying established operating system theory to AI context management can lead to more efficient and coherent systems.