TechCrunch publishes a plain-English glossary of common AI terms

In short: TechCrunch has published a regularly updated glossary to help readers understand common artificial intelligence terms.

What happened

TechCrunch posted a guide that defines many of the words that show up in AI news and product descriptions. The publication says AI researchers and companies often use technical language, so it built the glossary to make its own reporting easier to follow.

The glossary includes terms that people may already see in everyday tools, like “large language model” or LLM (the text prediction system behind chatbots such as ChatGPT). It also explains “hallucination,” which is when an AI gives an answer that sounds confident but is wrong, basically like a student guessing and not checking their work.

Other entries cover ideas like an “AI agent,” meaning software that can take actions for you across several steps, like booking a restaurant and adding it to your calendar. It also defines “training” (teaching the model by showing it lots of examples) and “inference” (using the trained model to produce an answer). The guide includes more technical terms too, like “compute” (the computer power needed to run AI) and “tokens” (small chunks of text that AI systems count and process, like words cut into pieces).

Why it matters

AI is now part of many apps and workplace tools, but the language around it can be confusing. A simple glossary can help people spot important details, like when a tool might make things up, or why some AI services cost more because they process more tokens.

Source: TechCrunch AI