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GPT-4o vs Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Context & Recall Comparison

OpenAI's GPT-4o offers a 128,000 token context window, while Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet supports 200,000 tokens. Beyond raw size, the models differ in recall accuracy and caching options. Let's compare their context window performance.

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1. Context Window Size and Allocation

Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 200k context window can hold roughly 150,000 words. GPT-4o's 128k context can hold roughly 96,000 words. Claude offers 56% more capacity, making it better for importing large source files.

2. Needle-in-a-Haystack Recall Accuracy

In recall benchmarks, Claude 3.5 Sonnet maintains near-perfect recall (99.8%) across its entire 200k token context. GPT-4o maintains similar accuracy up to 64k tokens, but exhibits minor recall degradation (92-95%) in the middle of its 128k context window.

3. Managed Context Caching Economics

Claude's prompt cache has a 90% discount on cache-reads, making it economical to carry large contexts across conversation turns. GPT-4o's caching offers a 50% discount on repeating prompts of any size.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better for document analysis, GPT or Claude?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is superior due to its larger context window (200k tokens), higher recall accuracy, and cheaper prompt caching.

Do these models share output limits?

Yes. Both models have output limits that are separate from their context windows. GPT-4o outputs up to 4k tokens (some versions support 16k), while Sonnet outputs up to 8k tokens.