AI Glossary
Plain-English definitions for every AI term that matters. Tokens, temperature, hallucination, RAG, fine-tuning — understand the concepts behind the tools you use every day.
System Prompt
A system prompt is a hidden set of instructions given to an AI model at the start of a session that shapes its behavior, tone, and capabilities throughout the entire conversation.
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Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing, structuring, and refining the text you give to an AI model to reliably produce more accurate, useful, or targeted outputs.
Read definitionContext Window
A context window is the total amount of text an AI model can hold in its working memory at once, including everything said in the current conversation and any documents you have shared.
Read definitionAI Hallucination
AI hallucination is when a language model generates information that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect, invented, or entirely unsupported by its training data.
Read definitionRAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is a technique that improves AI accuracy by fetching relevant information from an external knowledge source and passing it to the model as context before generating a response.
Read definitionTokens
In AI language models, a token is the basic unit of text the model reads and generates, roughly equivalent to three to four characters or about three-quarters of a word in English.
Read definitionWhat is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot made by OpenAI that responds to text in natural conversation. It can write, answer questions, summarize documents, help with code, and much more.
Read definitionHow Does ChatGPT Work?
ChatGPT works by predicting the most useful next word or phrase based on patterns learned from billions of text examples. It does not look up answers, it generates them.
Read definitionWhat is Claude AI?
Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic. It is known for long, thoughtful responses, a very large context window, and strong performance on writing and reasoning tasks.
Read definitionWhat is Gemini AI?
Gemini is Google's AI assistant and large language model. It is built into Google Search, Docs, and Gmail, and is available as a standalone chatbot at gemini.google.com.
Read definitionWhat is AI?
AI stands for artificial intelligence. It refers to software that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images, generating content, or making decisions.
Read definitionWhat is Generative AI?
Generative AI is AI that creates new content rather than just analyzing existing content. It can generate text, images, audio, video, and code from a prompt.
Read definitionWhat is OpenAI?
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that created ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL-E, and Sora. It is one of the most influential AI labs in the world.
Read definitionWhat is Anthropic?
Anthropic is an AI safety company that created Claude. It was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers and focuses on building safe, reliable AI systems.
Read definitionWhat is Midjourney?
Midjourney is an AI image generator that creates high-quality visuals from text descriptions. It is widely considered the best AI tool for artistic and photorealistic image generation.
Read definitionWhat is a Prompt?
A prompt is the input you give an AI model: a question, instruction, or piece of text that tells the AI what to do. The quality of your prompt directly determines the quality of the response.
Read definitionWhat is an LLM?
An LLM (large language model) is a type of AI trained on massive amounts of text to understand and generate human language. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are all built on LLMs.
Read definitionWhat is AI Temperature?
Temperature is a setting that controls how random or creative an AI's responses are. A low temperature produces consistent, predictable outputs. A high temperature produces more varied and creative ones.
Read definitionWhat are AI Agents?
AI agents are AI systems that can take actions autonomously: browsing the web, writing and running code, sending emails, or completing multi-step tasks without a human approving every step.
Read definitionWhat is Fine-Tuning?
Fine-tuning is training a pre-built AI model further on a specific dataset to make it better at a particular task, domain, or style, without building a model from scratch.
Read definitionWhat is Multimodal AI?
Multimodal AI refers to AI systems that can understand and generate multiple types of content, such as text, images, audio, and video, within the same model.
Read definitionWhat is Machine Learning?
Machine learning is a method of building AI where systems learn from data rather than being explicitly programmed with rules. It is the foundation of most modern AI, including language models and image generators.
Read definitionWhat is Deep Learning?
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with many layers to learn complex patterns from large datasets. It powers language models, image generators, and voice recognition.
Read definitionWhat is AI Bias?
AI bias occurs when an AI system produces systematically unfair or skewed outputs due to biased training data, flawed design choices, or the unequal representation of groups in the data it learned from.
Read definitionWhat is NLP (Natural Language Processing)?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It is the technology behind chatbots, translation tools, voice assistants, and modern AI writing tools.
Read definitionWhat is a Foundation Model?
A foundation model is a large AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted for many different tasks. GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini are all foundation models: trained once at massive scale, then used (or fine-tuned) for thousands of specific applications.
Read definitionWhat is AI Safety?
AI safety is the field of research focused on making AI systems behave reliably, honestly, and in alignment with human values. It includes preventing harmful outputs, avoiding deceptive behavior, and ensuring that as AI becomes more capable, it remains beneficial.
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