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THE GLOSSARY

Every letter in the soup

916 terms across 15 categories.

All terms

3D Generation

Creating three-dimensional shapes from text, a single image, or multiple views.

Multimodal

A/B Test

Comparing two versions by routing traffic to each and measuring which yields better outcomes.

Evaluation

Accelerate

A Hugging Face library that runs the same PyTorch training script across CPUs, GPUs, and Google's AI chips.

Frameworks & Tools

Accelerator

Specialized hardware built to run AI math far faster than a general-purpose CPU.

Hardware & Systems

Accuracy

The share of a model's predictions that are correct against known answers.

Evaluation

Action Confirmation

A human approval step before an AI agent does something consequential.

Patterns

Activation

The intermediate value a neuron or layer computes as data passes through a network.

Foundations

Activation Checkpointing

Saving memory in training by recomputing the model's intermediate working values instead of storing them all.

Training

Activation Function

The nonlinear step that lets stacked network layers learn complex patterns.

Foundations

Activation-Aware Weight Quantization

AWQ

Quantization that protects the few weights most important to a model's outputs.

Optimization

Adam Optimizer

Adam

An adaptive optimizer that tunes a separate learning rate for each parameter.

Optimization

AdamW

AdamW

A version of the Adam training optimizer that handles weight decay (a pull toward smaller numbers) separately.

Training

Adapter

Small trainable modules inserted into a frozen model so it can learn new tasks cheaply.

Optimization

Adversarial Example

An input crafted to make a model produce a wrong or unintended output.

Safety & Alignment

Adversarial Prompt

Input crafted to exploit a model's weaknesses and trigger unintended behavior.

Prompting

Agent

An LLM that can plan, call tools, and act in a loop toward a goal.

Patterns

Agent Benchmarks

Evaluations built to measure what AI agents can actually accomplish, not just model knowledge.

Evaluation

Agent Card

A structured profile describing what an AI agent can do and how to connect to it.

Patterns

Agent Memory

Techniques that let an agent retain information across turns or sessions.

Patterns

Agent Payments Protocol

AP2

A protocol for letting an AI agent make payments on a user's behalf, with limits and an audit trail.

Patterns

Agent Permissioning

Giving an AI agent only the permissions it needs for the task at hand.

Safety & Alignment

Agent Sandbox

A walled-off environment that limits what an AI agent can reach or change.

Safety & Alignment

Agent2Agent Protocol

A2A

An open standard that lets separate AI agents advertise capabilities and work together.

Patterns

Agentic AI

AI systems that plan, call tools, observe results, and act over many steps toward a goal.

Foundations

Agentic Commerce

Online shopping where AI agents help search, compare, buy, track, or return products.

Patterns

Agentic Loop

The repeating cycle in which an agent reasons, acts, observes, and continues.

Patterns

Agentic RAG

Retrieval driven by an agent loop that decides when and what to search.

Patterns

Agentic Workflow

A multi-step process where one or more AI agents plan, use tools, and act to complete a goal.

Patterns

Agents SDK

A software toolkit for building and coordinating AI agents.

Frameworks & Tools

AI Bubble

The worry that AI investment and hype have outpaced real value and may sharply correct.

Foundations

AI Cluster Orchestration

The software that schedules and manages AI workloads across large GPU clusters.

Hardware & Systems

AI Coding Assistant

An AI tool that helps developers write, explain, fix, and review code.

Models & Products

AI Copilot

An AI assistant embedded in a product to help users get work done within it.

Models & Products

AI Cybersecurity

Using AI to defend computer systems — and the new risks AI brings to security.

Safety & Alignment

AI Ethics

The study of how to build and use AI in ways that are fair, safe, and respectful of people.

Safety & Alignment

AI Governance

The rules, institutions, and processes that shape how AI is built and deployed.

Safety & Alignment

AI Image Editing

Using generative models to alter existing images, often from text instructions.

Multimodal

AI Impact Assessment

A structured review of how an AI system may affect people, rights, and operations.

Safety & Alignment

AI Literacy

The practical ability to understand AI systems and use them responsibly.

Foundations

AI Management System

AIMS

An organization-wide system for governing AI policies, risks, roles, and controls.

Safety & Alignment

AI Race

The competition among companies and countries to build the most capable AI fastest.

Foundations

AI Safety

The broad practice of reducing risks and harms from AI systems.

Safety & Alignment

AI Slop

Low-quality, mass-produced AI-generated content that clutters feeds, search results, and inboxes.

Safety & Alignment

AI Tutor

An AI system that teaches and helps a learner one-on-one, adapting to their needs.

Models & Products

AI Winter

A past period when AI funding and interest collapsed after hype outran results.

Foundations

AIME

American Invitational Mathematics Examination

A hard high-school math competition repurposed to test mathematical reasoning in models.

Evaluation

Algorithm

A finite, well-defined sequence of steps that solves a problem or performs a computation.

Foundations

Alibaba

A Chinese tech company whose Tongyi Lab builds the freely downloadable Qwen model family.

Organizations

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba's cloud division that develops and serves the Qwen language and multimodal models.

Organizations

Alibaba Qwen

Alibaba's model family and team behind the open-weight Qwen language and multimodal models.

Organizations

ALiBi

ALiBi

A way to encode token position by penalizing attention to distant tokens instead of adding embeddings.

Architectures

Alignment

Making model behavior track intended human goals, values, and constraints.

Safety & Alignment

All-Reduce

A collective operation that combines values across many workers and shares the result with all.

Hardware & Systems

Allen Institute for AI

AI2

A Seattle nonprofit AI lab focused on fully open models, data, and reproducible research.

Organizations

Amazon

A tech and e-commerce company whose AWS division is a major cloud platform for AI workloads.

Organizations

Amazon Web Services

Amazon's cloud platform offering GPU compute, custom AI chips, and managed model services.

Organizations

Analogical Prompting

Asking the model to recall similar solved examples on its own before solving the new problem.

Prompting

Annotation

Attaching labels, tags, or metadata to raw data so it can train or evaluate models.

Data

Anomaly Detection

Spotting data points that don't fit the normal pattern, such as fraud or equipment faults.

Foundations

Anthropic

An AI safety company that builds the Claude models and pioneered Constitutional AI.

Organizations

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