Why This Glossary Exists
AI moves fast. New terms appear in product announcements, research papers, and developer forums almost every week. If you have ever read a blog post about AI and hit a wall of acronyms - RAG, LoRA, RLHF, embeddings, fine-tuning - you know how quickly the jargon can get in the way of actually understanding what is going on.
This glossary is our attempt to fix that. We define terms in plain language first, then give you the technical context if you want to go deeper. You do not need a machine learning background to use it. We wrote it for product people, marketers, founders, and developers who are working with AI tools without necessarily having studied the underlying research.
We update the glossary regularly as new concepts enter common usage. If you think a term is missing or a definition could be clearer, let us know via the contact page.
Definitions written for humans, not researchers.
New terms added as the field evolves.
214+ terms across every letter.
Useful for beginners and experienced practitioners.
14 terms
Showing all terms starting with C
A prompting technique that encourages LLMs to reason step-by-step before giving a final answer, improving accuracy on complex tasks.
A software application that simulates conversation with users, powered by rule-based logic or AI language models.
A supervised learning task where an AI assigns input data to one of several predefined categories or labels.
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining - an OpenAI model that learns visual concepts from natural language descriptions, enabling text-to-image search.
A field of AI enabling machines to interpret and make decisions based on visual data such as images and video.
The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) an LLM can process in a single interaction - both input and output combined.
A large, structured collection of text data used to train or evaluate natural language processing models.
AI that models cause-and-effect relationships rather than just statistical correlations, enabling more robust and explainable decision-making.
The process of splitting large documents into smaller segments before embedding them into a vector database for retrieval in RAG pipelines.
An alignment technique developed by Anthropic that trains models to follow a set of principles and self-critique their outputs for harmlessness.
A self-supervised learning approach where a model learns representations by distinguishing between similar and dissimilar data pairs.
AI systems designed for natural back-and-forth dialogue with users, combining NLU, dialogue management, and NLG components.
A loss function commonly used in classification and language modelling that measures the difference between predicted probability distributions and true labels.
A training strategy where a model is exposed to easier examples first and gradually introduced to harder ones, mimicking how humans learn.
Commonly Misunderstood AI Terms
These are the terms that come up in almost every AI conversation but are often used loosely or incorrectly. Worth knowing what they actually mean.
A type of AI trained on massive amounts of text to predict and generate language. Models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini are all LLMs. The "large" refers to the number of parameters - the internal settings the model learned during training.
When an AI generates information that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect. It is not lying - the model genuinely does not know what it does not know. This is one of the most important limitations to understand when using AI-generated content.
The practice of writing inputs to AI models in ways that produce better outputs. A well-structured prompt gives the model context, a clear task, constraints, and sometimes examples. It is less about magic words and more about being precise about what you want.
A technique where an AI retrieves relevant documents or data before generating a response, rather than relying solely on what it learned during training. RAG is how tools like Perplexity AI give you up-to-date answers with citations.
Taking a pre-trained model and training it further on a specific dataset to specialise its behaviour. A fine-tuned model for legal documents will behave differently from the same base model fine-tuned on medical records, even though they started from the same foundation.
A way of representing text, images, or other data as numbers in a high-dimensional space, so that similar things end up close together mathematically. Embeddings power semantic search, recommendation systems, and many RAG implementations.