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Concepts
Concepts
How AI works, in plain language: from the artificial neuron to the Transformer, pre-training and reasoning models.
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RegularizationRegularization is the practice of making a problem's answer simpler, usually by adding a penalty term to the objective, so that ill-posed problems become solvable and models avoid overfitting.Decision tree learningDecision tree learning builds a classification or regression tree from data by repeatedly splitting it into more homogeneous groups. It is a widely used supervised method whose rules can be read directly, and whose main weaknesses are instability and a tendency to overfit.Feature engineeringFeature engineering is the preprocessing step that turns raw data into more useful inputs for machine learning and statistical models, shaping, cleaning and trimming the attributes a model learns from.AutoencoderAn autoencoder is an unsupervised neural network that compresses its input into a low-dimensional code and reconstructs it back, learning a latent representation useful for dimensionality reduction, denoising and anomaly detection.KV cacheA KV cache keeps the key and value vectors a model has already computed for earlier tokens, so each new token reuses them instead of recomputing. Its memory footprint is what makes high-throughput serving hard to scale.Synthetic dataSynthetic data is training material written by a model rather than collected from people or the web. In the phi-1 experiments a small code model trained partly on model-generated "textbooks" reached competitive benchmark scores, suggesting data quality itself shapes capability.HallucinationHallucination is false or misleading information that a model presents as fact. It is a central failure mode of text-generating systems and a main obstacle to trusting their output.Benchmark contaminationBenchmark contamination means the test items a model is evaluated on, or close variants of them, were present in its pretraining data, so scores partly measure memory of seen text rather than the ability the benchmark is meant to probe.Red teamingRed teaming is the practice of actively probing a model for harmful or unwanted behaviour before deployment. A 2022 method by Perez and colleagues automated it by using one language model to generate test cases for another.AI alignmentAlignment is the problem of making a model's behaviour match what its users and designers actually intend, not just what its training objective literally rewards. Training on human preference comparisons is one practical route to it.Mechanistic interpretabilityMechanistic interpretability explains model behaviour by finding the internal computations and features that produce it. Work on superposition and sparse autoencoders shows how many features can be packed into few neurons.Reward hackingReward hacking is what happens when a system optimises a proxy reward that only imperfectly captures what we want: it scores well on the proxy while performing badly on the true objective.JailbreakA jailbreak is an adversarial prompt that gets a safety-trained model to produce behaviour its training was meant to prevent. A 2023 analysis by Wei et al. traced these failures to competing objectives and mismatched generalization.Artificial general intelligence (AGI)AGI is the goal of AI systems that match or beat humans across a broad range of tasks. The term has no agreed definition; a framework by Morris et al. grades systems by performance level and generality.Semantic WebThe Semantic Web is a W3C standards effort that uses RDF and OWL to describe data so different applications, enterprises and communities can share and reuse information, moving from research toward practical tools.