Turn
One message in a back-and-forth — one side saying one thing before the other responds.
Think of it like
A single volley in a tennis rally: one hit, then it’s the other player’s shot.
Example
A five-turn conversation is roughly five exchanged messages between you and the model.
How it actually works
Chat is modeled as a sequence of turns, each tagged with a role. The whole history of turns is what the model reads each time, so conversations grow token by token and eventually strain the context budget. Managing turns — trimming or summarizing old ones — is part of building chat apps.
For product teams
Long chats silently eat context; at some point old turns must be trimmed or summarized.
For engineers
A single role-tagged message unit; the granularity of conversation state.
Related
- Conversation — Assembled into a conversation.
- User message — Each has a role like user message.
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