📚 The AI glossary: 15 terms everyone should know
6 min read · Updated 2026-09-13
The core terms
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) — software that learns patterns from examples.
- LLM (Large Language Model) — the 'next-word predictor' behind chatbots like ChatGPT.
- Prompt — the instruction you give an AI.
- Hallucination — when AI confidently states something false.
- Neural network — a pattern-spotting machine inspired (loosely) by the brain.
The terms you'll hear constantly
- Generative AI — AI that creates new text, images, or code.
- Token — a chunk of text a model reads (about ¾ of a word).
- Fine-tuning — teaching a model your specific style with extra examples.
- Training — the process of showing a model examples so it learns patterns.
- Context window — how much of your conversation the model can 'see' at once.
The ones that sound scary but aren't
- AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) — a hypothetical AI that thinks like a human. Doesn't exist yet.
- Alignment — the research field of making AI do what we actually want.
- Training data — the text/images a model learned from. Garbage in, garbage out.
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