$$C_{\mathrm{LC}} \sim O(n^2 \cdot d), \qquad C_{\mathrm{RAG}} \sim O(k^2 \cdot d), \qquad k \ll n$$

Equation 6 · Foundation Models

What Actually Happens Inside a Very Long Claude Context Window

This mathematical expression combines the displayed quantities; its precise role follows from the surrounding article text.

It is worth being precise about what “just use a longer context” actually replaces, because the alternative is not vague. Retrieval-augmented generation, as originally formalised by Patrick Lewis and colleagues, pairs a parametric model with a separate non-parametric retrieval step: a retriever selects a small number of passages likely to be relevant to a query from a much larger corpus, and only those selected passages, not the whole corpus, are placed in the model’s context for generation [ 14 ] . This publication’s own reporting on retrieval-augmented systems covers that mechanism, its indexing choices, and its failure modes at length elsewhere; the point relevant here is narrower and…

Meanings in this article

• $n^2$: the square of n; the writing.
• $n$: the writing.

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