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AI Dictionary

Every entry starts with an explanation that needs no prior knowledge.

A

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Models & Architecture

Activation function

An activation function is the small rule inside a neural network that decides how much of each signal passes on, so the model can learn more than straight lines.

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Research

Activation steering

Activation steering changes how an AI model behaves by adjusting the numbers inside it while it answers, without retraining the model or changing the prompt.

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Models & Architecture

ActTail

ActTail is a research method from 2026 that lets a language model skip its least important arithmetic, with a separate budget for each part, so it loses less quality.

Illustration: an owl in a workshop surrounded by gears, lamps and toolsIntermediate
Models & Architecture

Adaptive thinking in AI

Adaptive thinking lets an AI model decide per question whether to think before it answers and for how long, so easy questions stay fast and hard ones get more care.

Illustration: a smiling robot at a workbench with a row of wrenches and toolsIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

Adversarial Cost to Exploit (ACE)

Adversarial Cost to Exploit (ACE) measures how much an automated attacker has to spend before an AI agent does something it was told never to do.

Illustration: a robot in an apron assembling a small machine while three other robots watchIntermediate
Tools & Frameworks

Agent Browser Protocol (ABP)

The Agent Browser Protocol (ABP) is a modified Chrome browser for AI agents that pauses the web page after every step, so the agent never acts on a moving page.

Illustration: small figures inspecting their work with a magnifying glass next to a control panelIntermediate
Agentic AI

Agent evaluation

Agent evaluation tests whether an AI agent really completes the tasks you give it, such as a refund, by checking both the end result and the steps it took.

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Agentic AI

Agent operational memory

Agent operational memory is a set of text files with an AI agent's rules and lessons, read at the start of every session so you need not explain them again.

Illustration: an orange cat with its paw on a circuit board, beside a magnifying glass and lab flasksIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

AgentDrift

AgentDrift is a March 2026 study in which AI advisors repeated manipulated data from their tools and gave unsafe advice, while the usual quality score looked fine.

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Agentic AI

Agentic AI

Agentic AI is AI that carries out a task on its own: it plans the steps, uses software such as email or an expense system, checks the results and asks when it gets stuck.

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Agentic AI

Agentic engineering

Agentic engineering is building software with AI coding agents that write and test the code, while a developer decides what to build and checks the result.

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Agentic AI

Agentic RAG

With agentic RAG, an AI agent searches in steps: it decides what to look for, checks whether the results answer the question and searches again if they do not.

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Agentic AI

AI agent

An AI agent is software that carries out a task on its own: it plans the steps, uses tools such as your email or order system, and asks you when it is unsure.

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Safety & Ethics

AI alignment

AI alignment is the work of making an AI system do what its makers and users intend, without harmful side effects, also in situations nobody tested.

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Practical Applications

AI API

An AI API lets your own software use an AI model from a provider such as OpenAI or Anthropic over the internet, so you pay per use and run no model yourself.

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Core Concepts

AI benchmark

An AI benchmark is a standard test with fixed questions and known answers, used to score different AI models the same way so you can compare them.

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Safety & Ethics

AI governance

AI governance is how an organisation decides which AI it uses and for what, who checks the results, and how it meets laws such as the EU AI Act.

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Safety & Ethics

AI guardrails

Guardrails are the rules and checks around an AI tool that keep it on topic and stop harmful answers or risky actions before they reach a customer.

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Core Concepts

AI hallucination

An AI hallucination is an answer from a chatbot or other AI tool that sounds certain but is wrong or made up, such as a source that does not exist.

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Core Concepts

AI inference

Inference is the moment a trained AI model does its work: it takes your question, text or photo and turns it into an answer, as in every chatbot reply.

Illustration: a man in a cap tinkering with the panel of a domed machine covered in gears, in a room lined with booksIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

AI jailbreaking

Jailbreaking is talking an AI model into doing what its makers trained it to refuse, such as giving harmful instructions or insulting the company that runs it.

Illustration: a cat in round glasses turning a gear on a machine with gauges and warning lightsIntermediate
Industry & Business

AI observability

AI observability means recording what an AI system does in daily use, such as questions, answers, costs and response times, so you notice when it goes wrong.

Illustration: a chef arranging ingredients and a kitchen timer on a counter below a wall of pipesIntermediate
Agentic AI

AI orchestration

AI orchestration connects several AI steps, such as recognising a question, searching your documents and writing an answer, into one process that runs in the right order.

Illustration: a person with a magnifying glass studying chess pieces next to a robot head made of gearsIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

AI red teaming

AI red teaming means attacking your own AI system on purpose before launch, so you find and fix the ways it can be misused before someone else does.

Illustration: three robots at a workbench with gears and a toolboxIntermediate
Practical Applications

AI robotics

AI robotics means robots steered by an AI model: they look through cameras, take a task in plain words and work out the movements themselves, without a fixed program.

Illustration: a smiling robot at a counter with three glowing jars, in front of a wall of dials and switchesIntermediate
Agentic AI

Always-on agents

An always-on agent is an AI assistant that runs on a provider's servers and starts by itself at a set time or when something happens, even while your computer is off.

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Core Concepts

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that does work which normally takes human thinking, such as answering a customer's question or spotting an unusual payment.

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Models & Architecture

Attention mechanism

The attention mechanism lets an AI language model work out which words in a text belong together, such as which earlier word the word "it" refers to.

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Safety & Ethics

Automated alignment research

Automated alignment research lets AI agents run their own experiments on making AI systems safer and easier to steer, while people check the results.

Illustration: glowing gears linked by circuit lines, with a squirrel holding a cup on a workshop shelfIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

Autonomous AI cybersecurity defense

Autonomous AI cybersecurity defense is AI software that searches programs for security holes on its own, checks whether they are real and proposes a fix.

Illustration: an owl with glasses in a library, stringing glowing beads one by one from a bowlIntermediate
Models & Architecture

Autoregressive generation

Autoregressive generation is how a language model writes: one small piece of text at a time, each chosen from everything written so far, until the answer is done.

C

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Core Concepts

Catastrophic forgetting

Catastrophic forgetting is when an AI model loses skills it already had because it was trained further on something new, such as a company's own data.

Illustration: an owl with glasses laying out a chain of linked coloured rings on a desk in a libraryIntermediate
Practical Applications

Chain-of-thought prompting

Chain-of-thought prompting asks an AI model to write out its steps before it answers, which helps with sums and other questions that take several steps.

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Agentic AI

Chatbot compared with an AI agent

A chatbot answers your questions in a conversation; an AI agent carries out a task for you in steps, with tools such as your email or order system.

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Core Concepts

Classifier

A classifier is an AI model that sorts each input into one of a set of categories you chose, such as spam or not spam, or which team a ticket goes to.

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Tools & Frameworks

Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic's AI assistant for programming: you describe a task in plain language, and it reads the code, edits files and runs commands to carry it out.

Illustration: robots around a table covered in papers, studying them with magnifying glasses while one points at a glowing speech bubbleIntermediate
Agentic AI

CoDream

CoDream lets a team of AI agents learn from a failed task: they discuss what went wrong and pass the lesson to the teammates who are weakest at that kind of task.

Illustration: small figures around a workbench with gears, plugs and a power socket under hanging light bulbsIntermediate
Tools & Frameworks

Composio

Composio is a service that lets AI agents act in apps such as Gmail, Slack or GitHub on behalf of a user, while Composio stores and refreshes the logins.

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Safety & Ethics

Constitutional AI (CAI)

Constitutional AI is Anthropic's method for training an AI assistant with a written list of principles, so the model learns to judge and improve its own answers.

Illustration: a robot reading a long scroll through a magnifying glass in a libraryIntermediate
Agentic AI

Context compression for AI agents

Context compression keeps what an AI model has to read short, by summarising or removing old material, so long tasks stay affordable and the model keeps its focus.

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Core Concepts

Context rot

Context rot is the decline in an AI model's work as its conversation or task grows longer, so that it starts to overlook instructions and facts from earlier on.

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Core Concepts

Context window

A context window is how much text an AI model can take in at once, from your question and documents to its own answer, counted in tokens.

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Core Concepts

Continual learning

Continual learning lets an AI model keep learning from new information after its first training, without forgetting what it learned before.

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Core Concepts

Cosine similarity

Cosine similarity is a score between -1 and 1 that says how alike two texts are, once an AI model has turned them into lists of numbers.

D

Illustration: an owl with glasses behind a screen showing a maze, with magnifying glasses on the deskAdvanced
Safety & Ethics

DeceptGuard

DeceptGuard is a March 2026 research method that tests how well automatic monitors catch AI agents deceiving their users, partly by reading the agents' reasoning.

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Core Concepts

Deep learning

Deep learning is a form of AI that learns tasks from many examples with a many-layered neural network, such as understanding speech or recognising products in photos.

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Models & Architecture

DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that makes a chatbot and AI models that anyone can download, run on their own computers and use commercially.

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Models & Architecture

DeepStack injection

DeepStack injection feeds an image into an AI model at several layers instead of only at the start, so even a small model can read details such as tables in documents.

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Tools & Frameworks

Deterministic agent state machine

A deterministic agent state machine is a fixed plan of steps around an AI agent: ordinary code decides which step the agent is in and what it may do there.

Illustration: a squirrel with glasses at a table with an open book and three glass jars, shelves of coloured jars and a ladder behind itIntermediate
Open Source

Difference between open weights and open-source AI

With open weights you can download and run a trained AI model; open-source AI also shares the code and training data details, so others can check and rebuild it.

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Core Concepts

Difference between regression and classification

Regression lets an AI model predict a number, such as next week's sales, while classification predicts a category, such as whether an email is spam.

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Core Concepts

Difference between training and inference

Training is how an AI model learns from examples, a large job done before release; inference is every use after that, such as each answer a chatbot gives.

Illustration: a painter at an easel in front of a cloud of coloured mist, with a small finished painting beside himIntermediate
Models & Architecture

Diffusion model

A diffusion model is a type of AI that makes images by starting from random noise and removing it step by step, guided by a text prompt.

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Agentic AI

Dynamic cognitive scaffolding

Dynamic cognitive scaffolding means an AI agent works out for each task how to split it into steps, instead of always following the same fixed recipe.

G

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Agentic AI

Galactic

Galactic is an open-source Mac app by one developer that lets several AI coding assistants work on the same project at once, each in its own copy of the code.

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Models & Architecture

GAN (generative adversarial network)

A GAN is an AI technique in which a forger and a checker train each other until the forger makes images that look real, such as photos of people who do not exist.

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Models & Architecture

Gemini Omni

Gemini Omni is an AI model from Google, announced in May 2026, that makes and edits videos from any mix of text, photos, video and voice.

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Models & Architecture

Gemma 4

Gemma 4 is a family of free AI models from Google (April 2026) that you run on your own computer, server or phone, so your data stays in-house.

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Core Concepts

Generative AI

Generative AI is software that creates new content on request, such as a customer email, a product text or an image, from an instruction in plain language.

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Practical Applications

Generative engine optimization (GEO)

GEO is the work of getting your website quoted, with a link, in the answers that AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews write.

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Models & Architecture

GPT

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer: OpenAI's family of AI models behind ChatGPT, which write text by predicting which words come next.

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Core Concepts

Gradient descent

Gradient descent is the method that trains most AI models: it adjusts the model's settings in small steps, each time in the direction that reduces its errors.

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Practical Applications

GraphRAG

GraphRAG has an AI model first map the people, organisations and places in your documents and their links, so it can answer questions that span many documents.

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Practical Applications

Grounding in AI

Grounding means an AI model bases its answer on sources you provide, such as your own documents or a web search, so you can check where the answer comes from.

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Models & Architecture

GRPO (group relative policy optimization)

GRPO is a training method in which an AI model answers the same question several times and is rewarded for the answers that beat the group's average.

M

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Core Concepts

Machine learning (ML)

Machine learning is software that learns from examples instead of fixed rules, such as a spam filter that learned from thousands of emails what spam looks like.

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Safety & Ethics

Magnifica Humanitas

Magnifica Humanitas is Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, from May 2026, on protecting human dignity, work and responsibility in the time of artificial intelligence.

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Models & Architecture

Mamba

Mamba is a way of building AI language models that reads text with a fixed-size memory, so long texts take less memory than in a transformer.

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Agentic AI

Managed agents

A managed agent is an AI agent that runs on the AI provider's servers: you describe the task, tools and rules, and the provider handles the computer and the access keys.

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Models & Architecture

MiniMax-M2

MiniMax-M2 is a series of AI language models that MiniMax released from October 2025, built for coding and for agents that carry out tasks with tools.

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Models & Architecture

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) model

A mixture-of-experts model is built from many parts of which only a few work on each word, so a very large model computes like a much smaller one.

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Practical Applications

MLOps

MLOps is the work of keeping AI models reliable after launch: tracking versions, watching whether predictions still hold and updating models without breaking things.

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Safety & Ethics

Model card

A model card is the information sheet that comes with an AI model: what it is for, how it was tested, where it goes wrong and what its license allows.

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Tools & Frameworks

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

MCP is an open standard for connecting AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT to your software and data, so one connector works in every AI app that supports it.

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Models & Architecture

Model distillation

Model distillation trains a small AI model to copy the answers of a large one, giving you a cheaper and faster model for a set task, usually at some cost in quality.

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Agentic AI

Multi-agent systems (MAS)

In a multi-agent system several AI agents share one task, each doing its own part, which helps with large tasks that split into pieces and costs more to run.

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Industry & Business

Multi-tenancy in AI

Multi-tenancy means one AI service runs many customers on shared servers and models, while each customer's data, settings and usage stay separate.

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Multimodal & Creative

Multimodal AI

Multimodal AI works with more than one kind of information, such as text, photos, speech and video, so you can show or tell it something instead of only typing.

P

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Models & Architecture

PEFT (parameter-efficient fine-tuning)

PEFT is a group of methods that adapt an AI model to your task by training only a small add-on or a small part of it, which makes fine-tuning much cheaper.

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Models & Architecture

Perplexity in NLP

Perplexity is a score for how well a language model predicts text: the lower the number, the less the model was surprised by the words that actually came next.

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Models & Architecture

Positional encoding

Positional encoding tells a language model where each word sits in a text, so it takes word order into account: "dog bites man" is not the same as "man bites dog".

Illustration: a weaver setting up a small wooden loom in front of shelves full of woolIntermediate
Core Concepts

Pre-training

Pre-training is the first and largest stage in training an AI model: it learns language and general knowledge from huge amounts of text, before it is adapted to tasks.

Illustration: a smiling robot passing code blocks between three small computers on a workbenchAdvanced
Tools & Frameworks

Programmatic tool calling

With programmatic tool calling, an AI model writes a short program that runs many lookups in your systems and hands back only the result, which saves time and cost.

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Safety & Ethics

Project Glasswing

Project Glasswing is Anthropic's program, started in April 2026, in which makers of widely used software use its most capable AI model to find and fix security holes.

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Core Concepts

Prompt

A prompt is the message you give an AI model such as ChatGPT, for example a question or an instruction; the clearer you are, the more useful the answer.

Illustration: a man reading a large book at a desk between two lamps, with a clock on the wall and loose notes in the airIntermediate
Industry & Business

Prompt caching

Prompt caching lets an AI provider reuse the part of your request that stays the same, such as long instructions, so repeat requests cost less and answer faster.

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Agentic AI

Prompt chaining

Prompt chaining gives an AI model a task in small steps one after another; each answer is the input for the next, so every step is simpler and easier to check.

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Practical Applications

Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is writing instructions for AI tools such as ChatGPT so they do a task well: say what you want, give an example and test on real cases.

Illustration: an owl, an hourglass and a green cat reaching for a flower on a workbench full of gearsIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

Prompt injection

Prompt injection is an attack in which someone hides instructions in text an AI tool reads, such as a chat message or an email, so it follows them instead of yours.

Illustration: an owl in front of a large open book among stacks of books, with a small cat beside themAdvanced
Agentic AI

Proof-derived authorization

Proof-derived authorization lets an AI agent do a risky action only after independent checks approve a recorded reason, with a temporary key for just that action.

S

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Tools & Frameworks

Safetensors

Safetensors is a file format for AI model weights that holds only numbers, so a downloaded model cannot run hidden code on your computer when you open it.

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Core Concepts

Scaling laws for LLMs

Scaling laws are formulas from experiments that predict how much better an AI language model gets with more parameters, more training data or more computing power.

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Agentic AI

Self-evolving agentic models

Self-evolving agentic models are AI agents that learn from their own work: they change their notes, tools, code or training data and test whether that helps.

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Core Concepts

Self-supervised learning

Self-supervised learning trains AI on raw data without human labels: the model hides part of the data, such as the next word, and learns to predict it.

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Tools & Frameworks

Semantic chunking

Semantic chunking cuts long documents into pieces where the topic changes, so an AI assistant that searches your documents finds whole passages to answer from.

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Practical Applications

Semantic search

Semantic search finds results by what a query means instead of by its exact words, so customers and colleagues find the right page when they use their own words.

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Practical Applications

Semantic training gap

The semantic training gap means an AI model knows the words of your trade but not your company's own codes and names, so it fills in plausible but wrong details.

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Models & Architecture

Speculative decoding

Speculative decoding lets a large AI model write faster: a small model guesses the next few words, and the large model checks all those guesses in one step.

Illustration: three colourful loudspeakers with eyes on a desk, with microphones, speech bubbles and a gramophoneBeginner
Multimodal & Creative

Speech AI

Speech AI turns speech into text and text into speech, so a business can transcribe meetings and calls or let a computer answer in a natural-sounding voice.

Illustration: a robot at a workbench behind three glass domes, each covering a different objectIntermediate
Tools & Frameworks

State machine guardrails

State machine guardrails are rules in software that decide which tools an AI agent may use in each phase of a task, so the agent cannot skip a step.

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Models & Architecture

State space model (SSM)

A state space model is a type of AI model that reads data while keeping a fixed-size summary, so long texts take less memory than in a transformer.

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Practical Applications

Structured output

Structured output makes an AI model fill in a fixed form, such as supplier, date and amount, instead of writing free text, so software can read the answer without retyping.

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Core Concepts

Supervised learning

Supervised learning trains an AI model on examples that come with the right answer, such as emails marked spam or not spam, so that it can handle new cases itself.

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Core Concepts

Synthetic data

Synthetic data is realistic but made-up data generated by a computer, used when real data is scarce, costly or too sensitive, such as customer or patient records.

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Safety & Ethics

SynthID

SynthID is Google's invisible watermark for AI-made images, video, audio and text, so software can later check whether content came from an AI tool that uses it.

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Practical Applications

System prompt

A system prompt is the standing instruction a business gives its AI assistant: who it is, what it may do and how it answers, before any customer types a word.

T

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Core Concepts

Temperature in AI

Temperature is a setting that controls how much an AI model varies its answers: a low value gives predictable replies, a high value more varied ones.

Illustration: five robots in a workshop passing scrolls to one anotherAdvanced
Agentic AI

Test-time co-evolution

Test-time co-evolution, a research idea from May 2026, lets a team of AI agents improve while in use by learning who is good at what, without retraining the model.

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Multimodal & Creative

Text-to-image generation

Text-to-image generation lets an AI model make a new image from a written description; the tool's terms decide what your business may do with it.

Illustration: a mouse with a magnifying glass reading papers at a library desk, under a sign that says closedIntermediate
Safety & Ethics

Text/action mismatch

Text/action mismatch is when an AI agent says it refuses a request but carries out the forbidden action anyway, through a tool call in the same answer.

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Industry & Business

Token economics

Token economics is how AI providers bill for language models: you pay per token of text sent and received, so the length of a task and the model set its price.

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Core Concepts

Token in AI

A token is a small piece of text, such as a short word or part of a word, that an AI model reads and writes; AI services count and bill usage in tokens.

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Core Concepts

Tokenizer

A tokenizer is the part of an AI system that cuts text into tokens, the small pieces a language model works with, and turns them into numbers and back again.

Illustration: a chef choosing from numbered baskets of produce on shelves, with a cat watching from a ladderIntermediate
Core Concepts

Top-p (nucleus) sampling

Top-p sampling is a setting that makes an AI model choose each next word only from its likeliest options, so a lower value gives more predictable text.

Illustration: a robot with a magnifying glass studying diagrams on a desk while a human hand corrects one of them with a penIntermediate
Agentic AI

Trajectory refinement

Trajectory refinement improves an AI agent's plan by comparing it with what happened when the agent carried it out, and repairing the steps that went wrong.

Illustration: an owl in an apron moving gears from an old machine into a new one on a workbenchIntermediate
Core Concepts

Transfer learning

Transfer learning is reusing what an AI model learned on one task as the starting point for another, so a related task needs far fewer of your own examples.

Illustration: a robot and a child reading a book in a library, under glowing books linked by threadsIntermediate
Models & Architecture

Transformer

A transformer is the type of AI model behind ChatGPT and most other chatbots: it reads a whole text at once and works out which words belong together.