What I mean by “long horizon”

2026-05-20T00:00:00-07:00

Most of the ways we measure language models look at a single turn. You ask a question and you check the answer. But a lot of what people actually want from these systems happens over a much longer stretch. An assistant that plans a trip, or an agent that runs a multi-step job, has to keep track of what it’s doing, hold on to the right information, and notice when it has gone wrong.

That longer stretch is what I mean by “long horizon.”

People sometimes assume a bigger context window takes care of this. I don’t think it does. A context window is something the model has to re-read every time. Memory is something it can keep, update, or drop. The tricky part isn’t storing more. It’s knowing what is no longer true and not acting on it anyway.

I’ll use this space for short notes: mostly things I’m reading, and experiments that didn’t go the way I expected.

Md Nayem Uddin

What I mean by “long horizon”