💡 The paper introduces Recursive Language Models, a novel approach to enable large language models to process arbitrarily long prompts. The problem addressed is that current language models have limited context windows, which restricts their ability to handle long inputs. The proposed method treats long prompts as part of an external environment and allows the language model to programmatically examine, decompose, and recursively call itself over snippets of the prompt. This approach enables the model to handle inputs that are up to two orders of magnitude beyond the model context window. The results show that Recursive Language Models successfully handle long inputs and outperform base language models and common long-context scaffolds across four diverse long-context tasks, while having comparable or cheaper cost per query. Overall, the paper contributes a general inference strategy that improves the ability of large language models to process long prompts, making them more effective and efficient.