The superpower nobody uses
The context window explained three ways, working memory, a picture larger than your field of view, the floppy disk your grandkids will laugh at, and the thesis of the title: a million tokens is the most underexploited capability in AI, and whole product categories fall out of just filling it.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 6:34 (la memoria de trabajo)
- ↳ video diary @ 10:28 (la gente se queda en ChatGPT)
- ↳ video diary @ 14:14 (el árbol telefónico, colapsado)
- ↳ Entry 116-4: An agent for the hold music (la idea del agente telefónico, ahora con teoría)
Asked to define it, Julia reaches for accessibility ramps, built for wheelchairs, used by strollers and skaters ▸ 5:13, which is a fine theory of AI’s versatility but not the term. His definition: working memory ▸ 6:34. Twenty messages into ChatGPT, ask what you said at the start, and it invents something, because the window filled and the software behind it summarized or amputated the past ▸ 6:51. His analogy: a picture so large it exceeds your field of view; you see half and call it the whole ▸ 7:55. He even leaves a timestamp for posterity, the way people once bragged about 500-megabyte CDs: “contexto para mi yo del futuro… hoy en día uno no le puede meter ni 30 minutos de video”, a million tokens ▸ 9:50.
The thesis: this is the superpower people ignore, staying on ChatGPT precisely where it’s weakest ▸ 10:28. Severo runs on the exploit, a tutor that feels human because it holds everything you’ve ever told it ▸ 10:50, with an overflow plan that distinguishes storage from attention: keep the old photo in the drawer, just stop holding it in front of the model’s face ▸ 11:55.
el menú telefónico es un algoritmo para memorias pequeñas; ya no la necesitamos →
The payoff is the phone-agent idea getting its theoretical spine: press-one menus are divide and conquer, invented because no listener could hold twenty thousand leaf options ▸ 12:51. So skip the tree: hand every leaf to the model, “tiene que ser una multinacional gigantísima… para que no sea capaz de tener en su memoria todas las opciones” ▸ 14:20, and the caller just says what they need and gets routed in one turn ▸ 15:11. A data structure dies when the memory it was compensating for stops being scarce…