LLMs & Models3 min read
effective context, output ceilings, and the hidden tax of long windows
Your AI model says it can read 1 million tokens. It's lying. Here's the real math.
All four frontier LLMs advertise 1M+ token contexts, but effective recall, output limits, and real-world cost differ sharply. DeepSeek V4 Pro leads in output ceiling and cost, Gemini excels under 200K tokens, and Claude Opus wins on caching for interactive code review. This analysis breaks down the numbers from April 2026.
2026-06-30