Magic.dev Announced a Model. "Dropped" Is a Strong Word.

Magic.dev has a model. It has a 100 million token context window. You cannot use it.

This is the current state of affairs as of today, August 29, 2024 — and I want to be precise about this because the word "dropped" started forming in my head when I saw the announcement and I had to physically stop myself. Nothing dropped. A fact was disclosed. The fact is impressive. The model remains inaccessible.

100 million tokens is — and I'm going to say this flatly because the number already does the work — roughly 75 million words. You could fit most of a mid-size codebase in there. You could fit several. The entire Linux kernel is somewhere in that neighborhood and you'd still have room for an argument about tabs versus spaces encoded in full.

Whether this matters in practice, whether 100M context retrieves things usefully from its own depths or just charges you for the privilege of stuffing tokens into a void — that's a different question, and one we can't answer yet because again: not accessible.

What Magic has done is tell us the number and let us sit with it.

To be fair, that's something. The shape of the thing is now visible. It does look phenomenal, from this angle, through the glass, at a distance, with no hands on it.

I'll update when there's something to actually run. Until then this is a press release with a good number in it, which is fine, and which I will nonetheless continue thinking about until something else happens.