AI
47 AI terms explained simply, ordered from basic to advanced. Start at the top if the topic is new to you.
Basic
AGI
A hypothetical AI able to do most mental tasks as well as a person. Not here yet.
AI bias
When an AI system treats some groups of people unfairly, usually learned from its data.
Amazon Bedrock
A single AWS service to call AI models from Anthropic, Meta, Amazon and others.
Anthropic
The AI company behind Claude, built around making models safe and useful.
Artificial intelligence
Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
Chatbot
A program you talk to by typing or speaking, as if it were a person.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's chat assistant, the app that brought AI chatbots to the general public.
Claude
Anthropic's family of AI models, and the assistant app built on them.
Data science
Using statistics, code and business sense to answer questions with data.
Deepfake
A fake video, photo or voice made with AI to look and sound like a real person.
DeepSeek
A Chinese AI lab whose open-weight models showed that top AI could be built for less.
Gemini
Google's family of AI models, and the assistant app that carries the same name.
Generative AI
AI that creates new text, images, audio or code instead of just sorting things.
GitHub Copilot
An AI assistant inside the code editor that suggests and writes code.
The search company that gives most products away and makes its money on ads.
GPU
The chip that does thousands of simple calculations at once.
Hallucination
When an AI model states something false with total confidence.
Hugging Face
The website where people share AI models and datasets, and the tools to use them.
LLM
A neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word.
Machine learning
Teaching computers by showing them examples instead of writing every rule.
Mistral AI
A French company that builds AI language models, many of them with open weights.
Neural network
A pile of tiny math units that learns patterns from examples.
OpenAI
The company that made ChatGPT and turned AI into a household topic.
Perplexity
An AI answer engine that searches the web and replies with a summary and its sources.
Prompt
Everything you send to an AI model: the question, the instructions, the context.
Prompt engineering
Writing instructions for an AI model so it gives you what you actually need.
Token
The small chunk of text a language model actually reads.
Intermediate
AI agent
An LLM that can take actions, check the results and keep going until the job is done.
Amazon SageMaker
The AWS workshop for building, training and serving machine learning models.
Computer vision
The part of AI that lets computers find and understand what is in images and video.
Context window
How much text an AI model can take into account at once, measured in tokens.
Deep learning
Machine learning with many-layered neural networks, behind most recent AI leaps.
Embeddings
Turning words, images or documents into lists of numbers that capture meaning.
Fine-tuning
Extra training that adapts an existing AI model to a specific task or style.
Model Context Protocol
An open standard for plugging tools and data into AI assistants the same way every time.
Model parameters
The billions of numbers a model learns in training; '70B' means 70 billion of them.
Multimodal AI
AI that works with more than one kind of data at once: text, images, sound, video.
Natural language processing
The field of AI that works with human language: reading, writing, translating.
NPU
A small AI engine inside phones and laptops that runs models fast on little battery.
Open-weights models
AI models whose trained numbers anyone can download and run on their own machines.
RAG
Let the model look things up in your documents before it answers.
Reinforcement learning
Learning by trial and error, guided by rewards for good outcomes.
TPU
Google's chip designed specifically for the math of neural networks.
Training and inference
Training builds the model once; inference is using it, millions of times a day.
Vector database
A database that finds things by similar meaning instead of exact matching words.
