---
title: "A million tokens"
date: "2024-02-16"
summary: "Gemini's million-token window and Sora land the same week, and another intuition about limits quietly breaks"
tags: ["gemini","sora","context-window","scale"]
---

Yesterday a model swallowed a million tokens in one breath. The same afternoon, another one stitched a minute of video out of a sentence. I had to sit with that for a while.

A million tokens. Last summer a hundred thousand felt extravagant — I was excited to paste a whole document in and have it hold the thread. I built a small mental model around that ceiling: this much fits, this much doesn't, here's where you start summarizing and losing the edges. A working intuition. I'd settled into it.

Now the ceiling is ten times higher and the intuition is scrap.

This keeps happening to me. I draw a line where the technology can't go, I get comfortable behind it, and within months the line is a few rooms back. Not nudged. Moved.

The video one lands differently. Text I can reason about — it's the medium I think in. Watching a coherent scene assemble from a prompt touches something older, the part of me that grew up assuming a camera and a real afternoon were required to make a moving picture. That assumption is just gone now, quietly, on a Thursday.

I've shipped through enough shifts to distrust my own astonishment. Usually the demo is further from the daily reality than it looks. But twice in one week the goalposts didn't move — they vanished, and someone painted new ones somewhere over the horizon.

So I've stopped trying to guess where the wall is. Every time I name a limit, I'm really just describing this month's edge.

The better question isn't how much it can hold. It's what I do once holding everything is free.