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AI words, explained
The words behind the AI headlines, in plain English: tokens, context windows, hallucinations, RAG, agents and more.
Large language model (LLM)
An AI model trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next piece of text, so it can write, summarise and answer.
Token
A chunk of text a model reads or writes, often part of a word. Limits and prices are counted in tokens.
Context window
How much text a model can take in at once: your prompt, any files and its own reply together.
Hallucination
When a model states something false or made up as if it were fact.
Prompt
The instructions and material you give a model to respond to.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Fetching relevant documents when a question is asked and giving them to the model to answer from.
Fine-tuning
Training an existing model further on your own examples to change its behaviour or style.
Embedding
A list of numbers that captures a text's meaning, so similar texts sit close together. Used for search.
AI agent
A model that takes steps on its own toward a goal, such as calling tools, searching or editing files.
Training data
The examples a model learned from. It shapes what the model knows and what it gets wrong.
Temperature
A setting for how varied a model's word choices are: low is more predictable, high more varied.
Multimodal
Able to work with more than text, such as images, audio or video.
A chatbot confidently cites a court case that doesn't exist. What is this called?
- Overfitting
- ✓ Hallucination
- Tokenization
- Latency
You want a model to answer from your company's current policies without retraining it. What fits best?
- Raise the temperature
- Fine-tune it every week
- ✓ Retrieval-augmented generation
- Switch to a multimodal model
A long document you pasted seems to be partly ignored. What's the likely reason?
- ✓ It's longer than the context window
- The temperature is too low
- The model is multimodal
- Embeddings are switched off
Which of these is an AI agent rather than a plain chatbot?
- A model that answers one question
- ✓ A model that checks your calendar and sends a meeting invite
- A spell checker
- A search index