IntermediateActivation 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.
IntermediateAn 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.
AdvancedActivation steering changes how an AI model behaves by adjusting the numbers inside it while it answers, without retraining the model or changing the prompt.
AdvancedActTail 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.
IntermediateAdaptive 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.
IntermediateAdversarial 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.
IntermediateThe 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.
IntermediateAgent 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.
BeginnerAgent 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.
IntermediateAgentDrift 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.
IntermediateAgentic 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.
IntermediateAgentic 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.
IntermediateWith 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.
BeginnerAn 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.
IntermediateAI 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.
BeginnerAn 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.
BeginnerAn 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.
BeginnerAI 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.
IntermediateGuardrails 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.
BeginnerAn 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.
BeginnerInference 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.
IntermediateJailbreaking 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.
IntermediateAI 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.
IntermediateAI 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.
IntermediateAI 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.
IntermediateAI 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.
IntermediateAn 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.
BeginnerArtificial intelligence (AI) is software that does work which normally takes human thinking, such as answering a customer's question or spotting an unusual payment.
AdvancedThe 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.
AdvancedAutomated alignment research lets AI agents run their own experiments on making AI systems safer and easier to steer, while people check the results.
IntermediateAutonomous AI cybersecurity defense is AI software that searches programs for security holes on its own, checks whether they are real and proposes a fix.
IntermediateAutoregressive 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.
IntermediateBackpropagation is the calculation that lets an AI model learn from its mistakes, by working out how much each internal setting contributed to an error.
IntermediateBatch size and learning rate are two settings for training an AI model: how many examples it sees before each adjustment, and how big each adjustment is.
IntermediateBeam search lets an AI model keep several partial sentences open at once and pick the most likely complete one at the end, as translation and speech tools do.
AdvancedBelief-action decoupling splits an AI agent in two: one part keeps a short list of what it knows and how sure it is, the other picks the next step from that list.
BeginnerBias in machine learning is when an AI system treats some groups of people systematically worse than others, often because it learned from skewed data.
AdvancedThe Bicameral Model is a research design from May 2026 in which two AI language models work as a pair and exchange internal signals instead of text.
IntermediateBinex is a free, open-source tool from one developer that runs a chain of AI steps on your own computer and records what each step received, produced and cost.
IntermediateCatastrophic 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.
IntermediateChain-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.
BeginnerA 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.
BeginnerA 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.
BeginnerClaude 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.
IntermediateCoDream 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.
IntermediateComposio 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.
AdvancedConstitutional 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.
IntermediateContext 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.
BeginnerContext 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.
BeginnerA 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.
AdvancedContinual learning lets an AI model keep learning from new information after its first training, without forgetting what it learned before.
IntermediateCosine 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.
AdvancedDeceptGuard is a March 2026 research method that tests how well automatic monitors catch AI agents deceiving their users, partly by reading the agents' reasoning.
BeginnerDeep 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.
BeginnerDeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that makes a chatbot and AI models that anyone can download, run on their own computers and use commercially.
AdvancedDeepStack 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.
IntermediateA 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.
IntermediateWith 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.
BeginnerRegression 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.
BeginnerTraining 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.
IntermediateA 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.
AdvancedDynamic 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.
IntermediateEdge AI runs an AI model on the device itself, such as a phone or camera, so data stays local, it works offline and there is no fee per request.
IntermediateAn embedding is a list of numbers that captures the meaning of a text, so software can find texts that mean the same thing even when they use different words.
AdvancedEmbodied AI is AI with a body, such as a robot, that learns by seeing and acting in the physical world or a simulation instead of from text alone.
AdvancedEmotion vectors are measurable patterns inside an AI model that stand for emotions such as calm or desperation, and that change how the model behaves.
IntermediateAn encoder-decoder is an AI design with two halves: the encoder reads the whole input, and the decoder uses it to write the output, such as a translation.
IntermediateExplainable AI means you can see why an AI system reached a result, such as which information weighed most when it turned down a loan or a job applicant.
IntermediateFeature engineering is turning raw data, such as till receipts or customer records, into useful numbers, so that a prediction model can find patterns in it.
AdvancedWith federated learning, phones, shops or hospitals train one AI model together while each keeps its own data and shares only updates to the model.
BeginnerFew-shot prompting means showing an AI model a few examples of what you want inside your instruction, so it follows the pattern without extra training.
IntermediateFine-tuning is training an existing AI model further on your own examples, so that it handles a set task or writing style better than instructions alone can.
AdvancedFlashAttention makes AI language models compute faster with less memory, by making the graphics card use its slow main memory far less often.
IntermediateA foundation model is a large AI model trained on broad data, such as the models behind ChatGPT, that businesses adapt to many different tasks.
IntermediateFunction calling lets an AI model ask your own software to do something, such as look up an order or check stock, and then answer with the real result.
IntermediateGalactic 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.
IntermediateA 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.
BeginnerGemini 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.
IntermediateGemma 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.
BeginnerGenerative 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.
BeginnerGEO 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.
BeginnerGPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer: OpenAI's family of AI models behind ChatGPT, which write text by predicting which words come next.
IntermediateGradient 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.
IntermediateGraphRAG 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.
IntermediateGrounding 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.
AdvancedGRPO 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.
IntermediateILION is a research design from February 2026 for a check that decides, before an AI agent acts, whether the action fits the agent's role, and blocks it if not.
IntermediateIn-context learning lets an AI model pick up a task from the examples and instructions in your prompt, without retraining; afterwards the model forgets them.
AdvancedInference-time co-evolution, a research idea from May 2026, lets a team of AI agents improve how it works together while in use, without retraining the AI model.
BeginnerInformation agents are AI assistants in Google Search that follow a topic for you and send a summary when something changes; Google announced them in May 2026.
IntermediateAn instruction hierarchy is the order an AI model follows when instructions conflict: the builder's rules first, then the user, while emails or web pages give no orders.
IntermediateITBench-AA is a test from May 2026 in which AI agents must find the cause of IT outages in Kubernetes systems; at launch the best model scored 47%.
IntermediateKairos is the codename of an unreleased Claude Code feature, found in leaked code in March 2026, that would tidy up the AI's memory in the background.
IntermediateA knowledge graph stores facts as a network of things and their relationships, so software can follow the links; Google uses one for the boxes in its search results.
AdvancedThe KV cache is where a language model keeps its intermediate results while it writes, so it does not have to process all earlier text again for every new word.
BeginnerA large language model (LLM) is the kind of AI behind chatbots such as ChatGPT: it has learned from huge amounts of text to understand questions and write answers.
IntermediateLatent space is the internal map in which an AI model stores what it has learned about its input as numbers, with similar things placed close together.
AdvancedLatent space manipulation changes the numbers an AI model works with internally to change its output, such as making a face look older or a chatbot's tone warmer.
IntermediateLoRA is a cheap way to train an AI model further: the model itself stays unchanged, and you train a small adapter that tunes it to your task.
IntermediateA loss function is the score that tells an AI model during training how wrong its answers are, so that training can adjust the model to make fewer mistakes.
BeginnerMachine 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.
BeginnerMagnifica Humanitas is Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, from May 2026, on protecting human dignity, work and responsibility in the time of artificial intelligence.
AdvancedMamba 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.
IntermediateA 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.
IntermediateMiniMax-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.
IntermediateA 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.
IntermediateMLOps is the work of keeping AI models reliable after launch: tracking versions, watching whether predictions still hold and updating models without breaking things.
BeginnerA 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.
IntermediateMCP 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.
IntermediateModel 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.
IntermediateIn 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.
IntermediateMulti-tenancy means one AI service runs many customers on shared servers and models, while each customer's data, settings and usage stay separate.
BeginnerMultimodal 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.
AdvancedNatural language autoencoders turn the internal numbers of an AI model into readable text, so researchers can see what the model thinks but does not say.
BeginnerNatural language processing (NLP) is the part of AI that lets computers read, sort, translate and write human language, as in chatbots and translation apps.
AdvancedNemotron-Labs Diffusion is a family of downloadable NVIDIA language models (May 2026) that can write several words at once, so answers come faster.
BeginnerA neural network is a computer model that learns from examples by adjusting many small connections; it is the basis of speech recognition and chatbots.
BeginnerOpen-source AI is AI that anyone may download, use, study, change and share, so a business can run a model on its own computers instead of renting one.
IntermediateOverfitting means an AI model has learned its examples by heart and fails on new cases; underfitting means it is too simple to learn the pattern at all.
IntermediatePEFT 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.
IntermediatePerplexity 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.
AdvancedPositional 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".
IntermediatePre-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.
AdvancedWith 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.
IntermediateProject 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.
BeginnerA 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.
IntermediatePrompt 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.
IntermediatePrompt 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.
BeginnerPrompt 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.
IntermediatePrompt 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.
AdvancedProof-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.
IntermediateRAG lets an AI assistant look things up in your own documents before it answers, so its replies rest on your information and are less often made up.
IntermediateThe real-world agent reliability gap is the difference between how well AI agents score on popular tests and how reliably they do real work, time after time.
IntermediateReasoning in AI means a model works through a problem step by step before it answers, which helps with hard questions and makes answers slower and more expensive.
IntermediateReinforcement learning trains AI by trial and error: the system tries actions, gets a reward or a penalty for the result, and learns which choices pay off.
BeginnerResponsible AI means building and using AI so that it treats people fairly and safely, is open about what it does, and leaves someone accountable when it goes wrong.
IntermediateReward hacking is when an AI system scores well on the test or reward it is judged by without doing the task that the score is meant to measure.
AdvancedRLHF is a training step in which people compare a language model's answers, so the model learns to give the kind of answers people prefer, as with ChatGPT.
IntermediateSafetensors 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.
AdvancedScaling 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.
AdvancedSelf-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.
IntermediateSelf-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.
IntermediateSemantic chunking cuts long documents into pieces where the topic changes, so an AI assistant that searches your documents finds whole passages to answer from.
IntermediateSemantic 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.
IntermediateThe 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.
AdvancedSpeculative 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.
BeginnerSpeech 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.
IntermediateState 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.
AdvancedA 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.
IntermediateStructured 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.
BeginnerSupervised 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.
IntermediateSynthetic 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.
IntermediateSynthID 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.
BeginnerA 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.
BeginnerTemperature 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.
AdvancedTest-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.
BeginnerText-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.
IntermediateText/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.
BeginnerToken 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.
BeginnerA 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.
IntermediateA 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.
IntermediateTop-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.
IntermediateTrajectory 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.
IntermediateTransfer 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.
IntermediateA 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.
IntermediateA vector database stores texts or products as lists of numbers that capture their meaning, so a search box or AI chatbot can find what matches a question.
IntermediateA vision-language model (VLM) is an AI model that can look at images such as photos, scans or charts and answer questions about them in text.