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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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Boltzmann machineA Boltzmann machine is a neural network whose configurations are scored by a global energy and trained by a stochastic learning algorithm. Introduced by Geoffrey Hinton and Terry Sejnowski, it brought energy-based models into cognitive science and machine learning.Autonomous drivingAutonomous driving is the operation of a road vehicle by a computer system instead of a person. Its six automation levels, its two main technical traditions and its long line of research vehicles define how the field is discussed today.Topic modelTopic models represent documents as mixtures of latent topics, giving a compact statistical description of text collections. The 2003 Latent Dirichlet Allocation paper formalized this idea as a hierarchical Bayesian model.Deep neural network acoustic modelingDeep neural network acoustic modeling uses multilayer networks to map speech to units such as phones. A 2010 NIPS paper used Deep Belief Nets and a mean-covariance RBM to extract speech features, reaching 20.5% phone error on TIMIT.Variational autoencoderA variational autoencoder is a generative model whose encoder maps an input to a distribution over a latent space and whose decoder reconstructs the input from a sample; training maximises a lower bound on the data likelihood.Generative adversarial networkA generative adversarial network pits a generator that makes fake data against a discriminator that judges it, both trained in a zero-sum game; proposed by Ian Goodfellow and colleagues in 2014, it led to a series of architectures for generating images.DeepfakeDeepfake is synthetic media: images, video or audio made or altered with AI. The term, a blend of "deep learning" and "fake", appeared in late 2017 and now names a whole class of face-swapping and manipulation techniques.Retrieval-augmented generationRetrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets a language model fetch relevant documents from an external store and put them into its prompt before answering, so it can use knowledge beyond its training data and cite where an answer came from.Diffusion modelsDiffusion models learn to reverse a gradual noising process, so they can turn random noise into a new image by removing noise step by step. Latent diffusion, which runs this in a compressed space, became the basis of Stable Diffusion.Instruction tuningInstruction tuning is a supervised fine-tuning stage that trains a large language model to follow user instructions; the FLAN paper showed it substantially improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks.Text watermarkingText watermarking embeds a hidden statistical signal in generated text so that a short span of tokens can later be identified as machine output, while the text still reads normally to people.Prompt injectionPrompt injection is an attack in which text inside a model's input overrides its original instructions, letting an adversary hijack a language-model application — including, as researchers showed in 2023, through content the application retrieves on its own.Test-time computeTest-time compute is the computation a model spends while answering a prompt, beyond what training already fixed into its weights. A 2024 study by Snell et al. showed how to spend it adaptively, and how it can stand in for a bigger model.Computer useComputer use is an Anthropic capability, released in public beta in October 2024, that lets an AI model operate a computer the way a person does — reading the screen, moving a cursor, clicking and typing — so it can drive ordinary software built for humans.Sim-to-real transferSim-to-real transfer is the practice of training robot policies in simulation and then adapting them to physical robots, using synthetic data to supplement costly real-world demonstrations.Unsupervised learningUnsupervised learning trains algorithms on data that carry no labels, letting them find structure such as clusters, low-dimensional representations or generative models. It underlies clustering tools and neural generative models from the Hopfield network and Boltzmann machine to the variational autoencoder.AI agentAn AI agent is a system that perceives its environment and acts autonomously toward goals. The term covers everything from a thermostat to LLM-driven software that directs its own tool use.Multi-agent systemA multi-agent system is a computing system made of several interacting intelligent agents that coordinate to solve problems too hard for a single agent. Recent frameworks built on large language models let such agents talk to each other.World modelA world model is a machine learning system that learns an internal representation of an environment and predicts how it changes in response to actions, letting agents plan inside a learned simulator instead of by trial and error.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.