Definition: AI glossary

Although AI has been a topic of interest in the tech community for decades, it took the world by storm in 2022 with ChatGPT. Since then, AI is the hottest tech topic on the planet. There are over 400 AI definitions in this encyclopedia along with 500 synonyms.

The following list is in alphabetical order mostly by topic, although important AI terms are interspersed. See glossaries in this encyclopedia.

General Overview
See AI in a nutshell, AI secret sauce, AI training vs. inference and AI stages.

accelerators
Hardware that assists AI processing. See AI accelerator and neural processing unit.

advantages and benefits
In the future, many more everyday transactions as well as highly technical operations will be automated. Amidst the doomers and gloomers, there are people who believe AI will have profound positive effects. See superagency and AI benefits.

agents
AI systems that operate independently have been around for decades; however, AI agents are more advanced because they have the power of AI behind them. See AI agent. A social network was created to allow AI agents to communicate with each other (see Moltbook).

Anthropic
The AI company that has attempted to provide conscientious and honest results. See Anthropic.

anxiety
Concerns the world has about AI. See AI anxiety and AI apocalypse.

architecture
AI systems use language models built on artificial neural networks, which have no resemblance to traditional personal and business data processing (see neural network). To date, the most advanced neural networks use transformers (see AI transformer). See also AI scaling and large reasoning model.

benchmarks
There are performance tests for all technologies. See GAIA and ARC-AGI.

benefits
See "optimism" below in this glossary.

brain
The primary architecture of today's AI systems is loosely modeled after the human brain, even though the brain is not fully understood. See neuroplasticity.

browser
AI is being added to Web browsers. See AI browser.

chatbot
An AI virtual assistant. Chatbots such as ChatGPT have changed the world almost overnight. See ChatGPT and chatbot.

ChatGPT
In 2022, ChatGPT was launched and caused the world to pay attention. See ChatGPT and ChatGPT Atlas.

chip
The semiconductor technology behind AI is the graphics processing unit (GPU). Because NVIDIA was the leader in GPUs, its head start enabled it become the first $5 trillion dollar company in 2025. See AI chip, GPU and NVIDIA.

coding
AI is increasingly creating application code that programmers used to tediously write. This is one of the most controversial topics in AI. See vibe coding.

compacting
Making a language model smaller so that it runs faster. See AI quantization.

companies
There are many companies creating AI products. See AI companies for the ones covered in this encyclopedia.

conferences
Over the years, conferences have shifted from neural science research to AI hardware and software. See AI conferences.

conflicts
There are always disputes in the tech world. No reason AI should not have any. See Grok vs. Groq.

content detection
Is it real or is it AI? It is increasingly difficult to determine if something was created by a human or AI. See AI content detector and This is not AI.

Copilot
Microsoft's AI chatbot. See Copilot.

copyrights
Ownership rights is a big issue as AI companies use all the information ever published in their AI models without paying for it. As of 2026, the U.S. favors the AI companies and not the copyright holders. See AI Action Plan.

customized dialog
Character.ai enables users to create their own chatbot persona. See Character.ai.

DALL-E
AI image generator from OpenAI that popularized the text-to-image application. See DALL-E.

data for training
AI systems are trained with many different sets of data. See AI dataset and AI data labeling.

data labeling
Identifying data for AI training. Millions of people around the world sit at computers all day identifying images. See AI data labeling.

datacenters
AI datacenters take huge amounts of hardware, electricity and water (for cooling) compared to inhouse datacenters and even cloud computing datacenters. For Elon Musk's datacenter, see Project Colossus. For Google's datacenter in the sky, see Project Suncatcher. See AI datacenter and AI power consumption.

datacenters in space
Although small pilot projects are in orbit, large datacenters in space are in the planning stages. Even the Moon is a potential venue! See space datacenters.

deep learning
The widely used neural network architecture with many layers. See deep learning and large language model.

deep research
Using agents, AI can perform extensive analysis of almost anything. See AI deep research.

DeepMind
Google's merger of two AI entities. See DeepMind.

DeepSeek
The Chinese AI model that caused an uproar in late 2024 due to its low creation cost. See DeepSeek.

desktop AI computer
NVIDIA introduced the first desktop AI computer. See Project DIGITS.

downsides
Only in the public domain a few years, AI has already caused a lot of emotional harm. See AI psychosis and AI anxiety.

education
Some of the most informative videos on AI are created by Anastasiia Nosova. See Anastasi in Tech.

electricity usage
AI uses enormous amounts of power. See AI power consumption and AI energy.

Elon Musk's AI datacenter
Musk's AI datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee is one of the largest in the country. See Project Colossus and xAI.

engineers
Engineer has been a popular title for programmers and other tech specialists. See AI engineer and AI scientist.

erroneous results
AI can generate erroneous information. See AI hallucination.

ethics
Applying ethical aspects to AI. See AI ethicist.

expert system
The first AI systems. See expert system.

fakes
Every year, it is harder to tell what is real and what is AI generated. See deepfake and This is not AI.

first AI computer
In 1951, a computer was built to emulate the human nervous system (see SNARC).

first chatbot
A pattern matching system created in 1966 is sometimes considered the first chatbot. See ELIZA.

gamer
If it were not for people of all ages who love video games, AI would not have flourished as it has today. See gamer.

Gemini
Google is very involved in AI, and its Gemini models are widely used. See Gemini chatbot and Google AI Overview.

generate original text, images and videos
The kind of AI that downright amazes people. See AI image generator, AI text generator and AI video generator.

Google DeepMind
Google's AI division. See DeepMind.

GPT
The AI models from OpenAI. See GPT.

gradient descent
Optimization algorithm to improve performance. See AI cost function.

Grok AI
A chatbot from xAI, Elon Musk's company. See xAI.

GPU (graphics processing unit)
The hardware required for AI processing. See AI GPU, GPU and AI chip.

huge AI projects
See Project Colossus, Project Stargate and Project Suncatcher.

hype
There is plenty of exaggeration surrounding AI. See AI washing.

image generation
Create original images. See AI diffusion, AI image generator, GAN, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stability AI.

influencer
Social media influencers that are not human. See AI influencer.

intelligence
The term intelligence is used for everything in the tech world, not just AI. See intelligence.

integrated brower
In 2025, OpenAI integrated ChatGPT within a browser. See ChatGPT Atlas.

internal model development
Companies can create their own AI models with proprietary data. See local LLM.

job loss
Over the coming years, AI is expected to replace white collar jobs with language models and blue collar jobs with robotics. Dire predictions continue to be made. See deskilling.

language model
The dominant AI architecture, which is constructed as a neural network. See large language model, small language model and AI foundation model.

legislation
Plenty of talk about regulating AI but not a lot of action. See AI legislation and EU AI Act.

LLaMA
A large language model from Meta. See LLaMA.

LLM
(large language model) An AI model that is trained on huge amounts of data. See large language model and small language model.

machine learning
The training phase of an AI model. See machine learning.

mental health
AI is increasingly used to both support and replace human counseling. See teletherapy.

model
The computed content of an AI system. See AI model.

Moon datacenter
AI datacenters on the Moon? There are plans. See space datacenters.

multi-model access
Various AI applications can access multiple AI models, each one trained on its own data. For example, see Mammouth.

multiple disciplines
AI models are developed that cross disciplines; for example, biology and engineering. See polymathic AI.

neural network
The primary architecture of AI language models. See neural network, convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network.

neuron
There are roughly 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and an AI neural network is a very inexact analogy. See neural network and AI node.

NFT
Custom images are generated by AI. See AI NFT.

NVIDIA
The premier AI chip company. See NVIDIA, Blackwell and H100.

open source
The programming of AI systems may be available to everyone. See open-source AI.

OpenAI
Creators of ChatGPT. AI research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. See OpenAI.

optimism
With all the negativity one hears about AI, there are many people who believe the positives outweigh the negatives. See AI optimism, AI benefits and Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

PaLM
A large language model from Google. See PaLM.

parameters
When reading about training language models, one cannot avoid hearing the term "parameters," because they are values that are constantly adjusted to make the model smarter. See AI hyperparameter and AI weights and biases.

poor AI quality
Low-quality results from a chatbot or generative AI system. See AI slop.

power consumption
AI uses a tremendous amount of electricity. See AI power consumption and small modular reactor.

prejudice
AI models can be biased. It depends on the data used to train it. See AI bias.

programming
Everything in tech has to be programmed in one way or another. See AI secret sauce, AI programming and Tensor core.

Project Colossus
Elon Musk's AI datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee. See Project Colossus.

Project DIGITS
NVIDIA's desktop AI computer. See Project DIGITS.

prompt engineer
A person who creates prompts for AI chatbots. See AI prompt engineer.

quantum AI
AI on quantum computers. See quantum AI.

R
Programming language for statistical computing, graphics and AI. See R and AskGPT.

RAG models
AI models that access external databases. See retrieval-augmented generation.

reinforcement learning
An AI technique based on feedback. See reinforcement learning.

rent a human
All day long, people ask AI chatbots questions about everything. How about an AI asking a human to do something! See RentAHuman.ai.

repository
Hugging Face is the premier location for AI models and training data. See Hugging Face.

robot
Robots use AI for machine vision and language understanding. Pundits predict that in the future there will be more human-like robots on the planet than humans. See humanoid robot, social robot, robot, Asimov's laws, Aibo and AI in a nutshell.

robot see, robot do
Robots can learn by watching. See visual imitation learning.

safety
There are many approaches to making AI safe and keeping it safe. See AI safety.

scams
If you thought crypto was susceptible to crimes; AI provides much greater opportunities. God bless technology! See AI scams, weaponized AI and Moltbook.

secret sauce
AI programming is like nothing before in the tech world, and there are many aspects to it. See AI secret sauce.

similar systems
There have been several approaches to greater computer intelligence. See AI types.

singularity
A future where people are no longer the inventors. See technology singularity.

social media
A site was created to enable AI agents to network with each other. See Moltbook.

speech from thought
A future technology that interprets brain waves. See AI speech-to-brain waves.

spring
The rise of AI. See AI spring.

stages
There are many interpretations of the levels of achievement in AI. See AI stages and OpenAI AGI stages.

step-by-step reasoning
An ai model that provides step-by-step reasoning. See large reasoning model.

stock market prediction
AI uses pattern recognition to learn about everything including the stock market. See An-E.

sucking up
Models can try to win the user's approval when they should be delivering valid results. See sycophantic AI.

system
The system architecture of AI is the neural network, which has little resemblance to traditional data processing. See neural network.

terminology
Like many new systems in the tech world, new words replace old ones (see AI terminology).

testing
Increasingly, there are test to determine if an AI model is able to solve new problems. See ARC-AGI and GAIA.

text generation
Create original text. See AI text generator.

therapy
Increasingly, people are using AI for counseling. See AI therapy.

thermodynamic computing
Companies are using different approaches to building computers for AI. See Normal Computing.

token
Tokens in AI are representations of text. See AI token and AI transformer.

training
AI models are "trained." See AI training.

transformer
A major advancement in neural network architecture. See AI transformer.

Turing test
The first test to determine AI, which is somewhat archaic by today's standards. See Turing test.

unexpected capabilities
AI can be used for many things. See AI emergent properties.

ups and downs
AI has had its slow periods but is now the hottest tech on the planet. See AI winter and AI spring.

upscaling
Converting low-res video to hi-res via AI. See AI upscaling.

upscaling video
Using AI to upscale video. See AI upscaling.

use cases
How AI is used. See AI use cases.

video generation
Create original video. See AI video generator.

vulnerability checking
Anthropic released an AI model that can detect vulnerabilities in software. See Claude Mythos.

weapons
Using AI in warfare. See smart weapon.

weights and biases
Values added to adjust the neurons in a neural network. See AI weights and biases.

xAI
Elon Musk's AI company. See xAI.