The AI glossary, minus the hand-waving.
93 terms, each defined in one honest paragraph. No circular definitions allowed.
A
Agentic AI
AI systems designed to take autonomous, multi-step action toward a goal.
Read definitionAGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
A hypothetical AI that matches or exceeds human cognitive ability across all tasks.
Read definitionAI Agent
An AI that takes actions in the world, not just generates text.
Read definitionAI Alignment
The problem of making AI systems do what humans actually want, safely.
Read definitionAI Code Review
AI tools that automatically comment on pull requests, flagging bugs, style issues, and security problems.
Read definitionAI Content Suite
A single platform bundling multiple AI generation tools — writing, image, video — instead of separate point solutions.
Read definitionAI Copilot
An AI assistant embedded directly inside an existing app or workflow, rather than a separate standalone chatbot.
Read definitionAI Detector
A tool that estimates how likely a piece of text was written by AI.
Read definitionAI Eval
Systematic tests that measure whether an AI model or app produces good output.
Read definitionAI Humanizer
A tool that rewrites AI-generated text to sound like a real person wrote it.
Read definitionAI Observability
Tools and practices for tracking how an AI application behaves in production — costs, latency, quality, and failures.
Read definitionAI Safety Institute
A government body that independently tests frontier AI models for dangerous capabilities before or after release.
Read definitionAI Sandbox
An isolated computing environment where AI agents can act without touching your real data or files.
Read definitionAI Search
Search engines that synthesise answers from sources rather than returning a list of links.
Read definitionAI Startup
A company building on or with AI — the largest startup category of 2024–2026.
Read definitionAI Voice Cloning
AI that recreates a specific human voice from a short audio sample.
Read definitionAI Watermarking
Invisible markers embedded in AI-generated images, video, or text to identify them as machine-made.
Read definitionAI Wearable
A small worn device, like a pendant or pin, that records ambient audio and turns it into searchable AI notes.
Read definitionAPI (Application Programming Interface)
How developers access AI models programmatically — the foundation of every AI product.
Read definitionB
C
Chain-of-Thought (CoT)
Prompting an AI to "show its work" — dramatically improves accuracy on hard problems.
Read definitionChatGPT
OpenAI's flagship AI assistant — the app that kicked off the AI boom in late 2022.
Read definitionClaude
Anthropic's AI assistant — known for writing quality, long-document analysis, and coding.
Read definitionClaude Opus
Anthropic's most capable model family — leads on coding and long-form reasoning.
Read definitionCompute Governance
Government policies that control access to the advanced chips and data centers needed to train frontier AI models.
Read definitionComputer Use
AI that can see your screen, move your cursor, and click — controlling a computer like a person would.
Read definitionContext Engineering
Deliberately deciding what information to feed an AI model at each step, beyond just writing a good prompt.
Read definitionContext Window
The amount of text an AI can consider at once — its short-term memory.
Read definitionCursor
The AI-first VS Code fork — most-used AI coding tool among professional developers.
Read definitionD
E
F
Fine-Tuning
Continuing to train a pre-trained AI model on your own specific data.
Read definitionFrontier Model
The most capable AI models at the cutting edge — GPT-5.6, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Pro.
Read definitionFunction Calling
How LLMs invoke tools — the model outputs structured JSON instead of free text.
Read definitionG
Gemini
Google's frontier AI family — biggest context window, strongest on multimodal.
Read definitionGitHub Copilot
The AI coding autocomplete that started the AI-pair-programming category.
Read definitionGPT-5
OpenAI's flagship model — reasoning, multimodal, and the model behind most ChatGPT Plus output.
Read definitionGrok
xAI's chatbot — real-time X access, fewer content restrictions, competitive with GPT-5.
Read definitionGrounding (AI)
Connecting an AI's answers to verifiable, real-world sources instead of relying only on what it memorized in training.
Read definitionGuardrails (AI)
Rules and filters wrapped around an AI system to keep its output within safe, intended limits.
Read definitionH
Hallucination
When an AI confidently generates text that is plausible-sounding but factually wrong.
Read definitionHugging Face
The GitHub of AI — hosts open-source models, datasets, and inference for the whole community.
Read definitionHybrid Model Architecture (Transformer-Mamba)
AI models that blend standard Transformer layers with a state-space design like Mamba to handle long context more cheaply.
Read definitionL
Large Language Model (LLM)
An AI trained on enormous amounts of text to predict what word comes next.
Read definitionLatent Space
The internal, abstract mathematical space where an AI model represents the meaning of its inputs.
Read definitionLong Context
AI models that can hold millions of tokens at once — entire codebases, books, year-long threads.
Read definitionLPU (Language Processing Unit)
A chip built specifically for fast AI inference, pioneered by Groq as an alternative to general-purpose GPUs.
Read definitionM
Midjourney
The AI image generator with the most distinctive aesthetic — runs in Discord.
Read definitionMixture of Depths (MoD)
A neural architecture where the model decides per-token how many layers to use — saving compute on easy tokens.
Read definitionMixture of Experts (MoE)
An AI architecture where only a fraction of the model "wakes up" per request.
Read definitionModel Card
A standardized document publishing an AI model's training data, capabilities, limitations, and known risks.
Read definitionModel Collapse
A degradation that can occur when AI models are trained too heavily on other AI-generated content instead of real-world data.
Read definitionModel Context Protocol (MCP)
The open standard that lets AI assistants connect to external tools and data sources.
Read definitionModel Distillation
Training a small AI model to mimic a larger one — how GPT-5 mini came from GPT-5.
Read definitionModel Router
A system that automatically sends each request to the cheapest AI model capable of handling it well.
Read definitionModel Weights
The millions or billions of learned numbers inside a trained AI model that encode everything it knows.
Read definitionMulti-Agent Orchestration
Coordinating several specialized AI agents that each handle part of a larger task.
Read definitionMultimodal AI
AI that handles text, images, audio, and video in a single model.
Read definitionO
P
Perplexity
The AI search engine — answers with citations, replaces Google for research queries.
Read definitionPrompt Caching
A pricing trick that cuts AI API input cost by 50–90% for repeat-context workflows.
Read definitionPrompt Engineering
The skill of writing clear, structured instructions that get the best results from AI.
Read definitionPrompt Injection
An attack that hides malicious instructions inside content an AI reads, tricking it into acting against its user.
Read definitionR
RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
The technique that lets AI actually know things it was not trained on.
Read definitionRAG vs Fine-Tuning
When to use RAG (retrieval) versus fine-tuning (continued training) — the central architectural choice.
Read definitionReasoning Model
An AI that "thinks" before answering — explicit step-by-step reasoning at inference time.
Read definitionRed-Teaming (AI)
Deliberately trying to break an AI model before release to find dangerous or unwanted behavior first.
Read definitionRLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
How AI labs teach models to be helpful, harmless, and honest — using human ratings.
Read definitionS
Shadow AI
Employees using AI tools at work without their employer's knowledge, review, or approval.
Read definitionSmall Language Model (SLM)
A compact AI model, typically under 10 billion parameters, built to run fast and cheap on limited hardware.
Read definitionSora 2
OpenAI's AI video generator — text or image to high-quality video clips.
Read definitionSovereign AI
AI models built and hosted within a country's borders for data sovereignty and strategic independence.
Read definitionSpeculative Decoding
A trick that makes frontier AI 2-3x faster by using a tiny model to guess tokens for a big one to verify.
Read definitionSpeech-to-Text API
A service that converts audio into text, which other apps plug into instead of building transcription themselves.
Read definitionStable Diffusion
The open-source AI image generator — runs locally, infinitely customisable.
Read definitionSynthetic Data
Artificially generated data used to train AI models when real-world data is scarce, costly, or sensitive.
Read definitionSystem Prompt
The hidden instructions an app sends an AI model before the user's message, shaping its behavior and persona.
Read definitionT
Temperature
The AI setting that controls how creative (high) or predictable (low) responses are.
Read definitionTest-Time Compute
Letting an AI think longer at inference time — the breakthrough behind reasoning models.
Read definitionTokens
The chunks of text AI models read and produce — usually 3–4 characters each.
Read definitionTool Use
How AI models call external tools — search, code execution, APIs — to do real work.
Read definition