The only AI glossary you’ll need this year

Artificial intelligence is rewriting the world, and simultaneously inventing a whole new language to describe how it’s doing it. Sit in on any product meeting, pitch, or panel these days, and you’ll hear people toss around LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and a dozen other terms that can make even very smart people in the tech world feel a little insecure. This glossary is our attempt to fix that: pain-English definitions of the AI terms you’re most likely to actually run into, whether you’re building with this stuff, investing in it, or just trying to keep up by reading TechCrunch or listening to related podcasts. We update it regularly as the field evolves, so consider it a living document, much like the AI systems it describes.