If you're asking ChatGPT about its own characteristics, you should not believe the responses. Models can't examine themselves, so unless the model was trained o

If you're asking ChatGPT about its own characteristics, you should not believe the responses. Models can't examine themselves, so unless the model was trained on specific information about itself, or unless the info is put into the System Prompt, then it cannot know the answer. A response indicating 4096 tokens would just be a hallucination, or a misunderstanding based on training data that saw references to what older versions of ChatGPT were trained on. ChatGPT-4 is powered by GPT-4 Turbo at this point, so it has a context window that is much larger than 4096 tokens, whether it knows it or not. The ChatGPT application may limit the context size from reaching the full 128k to keep costs down, and it will be using some of the context window for its own purposes, but it's certainly able to maintain context across more than 4096 tokens of conversation.