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Definition: AI terminology


There are plenty of new terms relating to artificial intelligence (see AI glossary), but a strange one has been "AI" itself. Whereas for the past 75 years, everything in the computer world has been a system (computer system, information system, operating system, etc.), AI people have avoided the word "system" like the plague. An AI system, the combination of hardware and software that produces results, has often been called simply an "AI." For example, "an AI can do this... an AI can do that..." has been common phraseology. It sounds a bit short, nevertheless, people say "the computer does this" when in fact it is always "the computer system" that is doing the work.

AI Models
Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot are AI applications everyone can use. They rely on large language models (LLMs), which are neural networks that have been trained on huge amounts of data. Therefore, "AI model" is a commonly used term to refer to AI applications because they are the source from which chatbots obtain their knowledge. The earliers AI systems did not use the model architecture (see expert system). See large language model and neural network.

AI Agents
As AI has become more commonplace, AI agents have emerged, which enable AI models to interact with the outside world (see AI agent). More terms describing AI are AGI, Super AI, AI hard and AI complete (see AGI, AI complete and technology singularity). For an AI overview, see AI in a nutshell. For more AI terms, see AI glossary.