AI Buzzwords
A plain-language glossary of AI terms with no jargon and no hype, just clear definitions you can actually understand.
- AI Agent
An AI system that autonomously plans and executes multi-step tasks using tools and decision-making loops.
- Agentic AI
AI systems designed to autonomously plan, act, and iterate toward completing complex goals.
- Alignment
The field of research focused on making AI systems behave in accordance with human values and intentions.
- Attention Mechanism
The neural network component that lets models focus on relevant parts of their input when generating each output.
- Benchmark
A standardized test used to measure and compare AI model performance across specific tasks.
- Chain of Thought
A prompting technique where the AI shows its step-by-step reasoning before giving a final answer.
- Context Window
The maximum amount of text an AI model can consider at once, measured in tokens.
- Diffusion Model
An AI model that generates images by learning to reverse a gradual noising process.
- Distillation
Training a smaller, faster model to mimic the behavior of a larger, more capable model.
- Embeddings
Numerical representations of text that capture semantic meaning, enabling AI to measure similarity between concepts.
- Few-Shot Learning
An AI's ability to perform a new task after seeing just a few examples in the prompt.
- Fine-tuning
Adapting a pre-trained AI model to a specific task or domain by training it on additional specialized data.
- Foundation Model
A large AI model trained on broad data that serves as the base for many downstream applications.
- GPT
Generative Pre-trained Transformer - OpenAI's family of language models.
- Guardrails
Safety mechanisms that constrain AI behavior to prevent harmful, biased, or off-topic outputs.
- Hallucination
When an AI model generates confident-sounding information that is factually incorrect or fabricated.
- Inference
The process of using a trained AI model to generate outputs from new inputs.
- Large Language Model (LLM)
An AI system trained on massive text datasets to understand and generate human language.
- Latent Space
The compressed, abstract representation that AI models use internally to encode and manipulate concepts.
- Mixture of Experts (MoE)
An architecture where only a subset of model parameters activate for each input, enabling larger models at lower compute cost.
- Multimodal
AI systems that can process and generate multiple types of content - text, images, audio, and video.
- Neural Network
A computing system inspired by biological brains, made of layers of interconnected nodes that learn from data.
- Open Source AI
AI models whose weights and code are publicly available for anyone to use, modify, and deploy.
- Parameter
A learnable value in a neural network that gets adjusted during training to improve model performance.
- Prompt Engineering
The practice of crafting effective inputs to AI models to get better, more accurate outputs.
- Quantization
Reducing the precision of a model's numerical values to make it smaller and faster, with minimal quality loss.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A technique that gives AI models access to external knowledge by retrieving relevant documents before generating responses.
- RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
A training technique that uses human preferences to align AI behavior with human values and intentions.
- Synthetic Data
Training data generated by AI models rather than collected from real-world sources.
- Temperature
A parameter that controls the randomness and creativity of AI model outputs.
- Token
The basic unit of text that AI models process - roughly 3/4 of a word in English.
- Tokenizer
The component that converts text into numerical tokens that a language model can process.
- Transformer
The neural network architecture behind all modern language models, based on self-attention mechanisms.
- Vector Database
A database optimized for storing and searching embedding vectors, enabling fast similarity search.
- Zero-Shot
An AI's ability to perform a task it has never been explicitly shown examples of.