The Context Window Lie: Why Your LLM Remembers Nothing Every time you paste 200K tokens into Claude or GPT, you're not extending its memory. You're paying for amnesia at scale. The "1M token context" headline is a billing mechanism, not a memory system. And the gap between what the marketing implies and what the model actually does is where most LLM products quietly bleed money and reliability. 1. The Marketing vs. The Math "1 million tokens of context" sounds like the model holds a million tokens of understanding. It does not. It re-reads them. Every. Single. Turn. Standard transformer attention is O(n²) in sequence length.…