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Free Lesson
Context Rot: When Long Context Fails
30 min
Sep 10, 2025 4:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
Beyond "Needle in a Haystack"
Why standard benchmarks are misleading and fail to capture the real-world challenges of long-context applications.
How Distractors & Context Structure Cause Failure
Discover how topically-related "distractors" and even the logical flow of your context can degrade model performance.
The Importance of Context Engineering
Learn why how you present information to an LLM is just as critical as what you present for achieving reliable result
Model-Specific Failure Modes
See how different models like Claude and GPT exhibit unique failure patterns, from abstention to confident hallucination
Why this topic matters
As LLMs boast million-token context windows, it’s assumed long-context is a solved problem. Kelly Hong from Chroma reveals their
groundbreaking research on "Context Rot," showing how performance degrades in non-obvious ways. This session is critical for anyone
building reliable long-context applications and avoiding costly, unexpected failures in production.
You'll learn from
Kelly Hong
Retrieval Researcher @ Chroma
Hamel Husain
ML Engineer with 20 years of experience