The prompt's tokens form one ordered input sequence, and that sequence must fit inside the context window, the maximum number of tokens the model can attend to at once. When the sequence reaches that limit, no further tokens can be added, so long conversations must be trimmed or summarized to stay within the bound.
How ChatGPT Writes One Token at a Time
From Your Words to Tokens
Fitting Inside the Window
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All those token IDs line up in the order you wrote them. That single ordered sequence is what the model receives as its input.
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