What Is an Activation Function?
A mathematical rule inside an AI model that decides whether a piece of information is passed along to the next part of the model.
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85 terms · growing with what you tell us is missing
A
What is agentic coding?
Agentic coding delegates a whole task to an AI agent that plans, edits, runs tests and iterates until it is done.
AGENTS.md
NewWhat Is AGENTS.md?
AGENTS.md is a Markdown file in a repository that gives AI coding agents project-specific instructions. Which tools read it, and which do not.
What Is AI Agent Evaluation?
AI agent evaluation measures whether an agent does its job, scoring the path it took as well as the answer, across repeated runs.
What Are AI Agents?
An autonomous program that understands a goal, makes a plan and carries out a series of tasks with software tools to achieve it.
What Is AI Bias?
Bias in an AI system is a systematic error that produces unfair or discriminatory outcomes against certain groups.
What Are AI Guardrails?
Rules and constraints that keep an AI system operating safely, ethically and within its intended purpose.
What Is an AI Hallucination?
An AI hallucination is when a generative AI model produces false, nonsensical, or factually incorrect information but presents it as if it were true.
What Is an AI Model?
An AI model is a specialized digital file that has been trained on data to recognize patterns and make predictions or decisions.
What Is the AI Productivity Paradox?
The gap between AI making individual developers faster and organisational delivery not improving at all.
What Is an Algorithm?
An algorithm is a set of step-by-step instructions a computer follows to accomplish a specific task.
What Is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?
A theoretical form of AI that could understand, learn and apply its intelligence to any intellectual problem a human being can.
What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
The field of computer science that builds systems able to do tasks that normally need human intelligence, such as learning and reasoning.
What Is an Artificial Neural Network?
A computing system inspired by the human brain that learns to find patterns and make decisions from large amounts of data.
What Is Attention in AI?
A mechanism that lets an AI model focus on the most relevant parts of its input when making a decision or generating output.
C
What Is Chain-of-Thought?
Chain-of-thought is a method for instructing an AI to break down a complex problem into a series of logical steps before giving a final answer.
What Is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through text or voice commands.
What Is Computer Vision?
The field of AI that enables computers to derive meaningful information from images, videos and other visual inputs.
What Is a Confidence Score?
A confidence score is a number, typically a percentage, that represents how certain an AI model is about its own prediction or decision.
What Is a Context Window?
The context window is the amount of text an AI model can remember and consider at one time when generating a response.
What Is Cross-Entropy?
A training measure that scores how wrong an AI model's predictions are, penalizing confident mistakes most heavily.
D
What Is Data Mining?
Data mining is the process of automatically discovering patterns, connections, and valuable insights from large sets of business data.
What Is Data Science?
Data science is the practice of turning raw business data into actionable insights and predictions that can guide strategic decisions.
What Is Deep Learning?
A type of AI that learns from vast amounts of data using layered neural networks loosely modeled on the human brain.
What are DORA metrics?
The five measures of software delivery performance: definitions, 2024–25 benchmarks, how to measure them, and what AI changes.
E
What Are Embeddings?
A way to turn text, images or user profiles into numbers that computers can easily compare and analyze.
What Is Emergent Behavior in AI?
Capabilities or characteristics that arise unexpectedly from the interactions inside an AI system, without being explicitly programmed.
What Is Entity Extraction?
Entity extraction is an AI technique that automatically identifies and classifies key pieces of information within text into predefined categories.
What Is Explainable AI (XAI)?
Tools and methods that let people understand and trust the results produced by artificial intelligence models.
F
What Is Few-Shot Learning?
Few-shot learning is a technique that allows an AI model to learn a new task from just a handful of examples, rather than thousands.
What Is Fine-Tuning?
Adapting a general-purpose AI model so it excels at a specific task or understands a company's own data.
What Is FinOps for AI?
FinOps for AI is the practice of managing AI spend as an operational discipline, metered in tokens rather than instance-hours.
What Is a Foundation Model?
A very large AI system trained on broad data that can be adapted to perform many different, specific tasks.
What Is Function Calling?
Function calling is a feature that allows an AI model to use external tools and access live information to answer questions or complete tasks.
G
What Is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)?
An AI system in which two neural networks compete to create new, realistic data such as images, text or sound.
What Is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create entirely new and original content, such as text, images, audio, and code.
What Is Grounding in AI?
Grounding is the process of connecting an AI's responses to specific, verifiable sources of information to ensure accuracy and relevance.
H
What Is a Hyperparameter?
A hyperparameter is a setting a data scientist adjusts before training an AI model to control how it learns.
I
What Is Inference in AI?
Inference is the process of using a trained AI model to make predictions or decisions based on new, real-world data.
What Is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)?
An AI technology that automatically reads, understands and extracts key information from business documents.
What Is Intent Recognition?
Intent recognition is the AI process of identifying the underlying goal or purpose of a user's typed or spoken request.
L
What Is a Label in Machine Learning?
A label is a tag that provides the correct answer or classification for a piece of data, used to teach an AI system.
What Is a Large Language Model (LLM)?
A large language model (LLM) is an artificial intelligence program trained to understand and generate human-like text.
M
What Is Machine Learning?
A type of AI that lets computers learn from data and improve at a task without being explicitly programmed for every outcome.
What Is a Multi-Agent System?
A system in which multiple independent software agents work together to solve a problem too complex for a single program.
What Is Multimodal AI?
AI that can understand, process and generate several types of data at once, such as text, images, audio and video.
N
What Is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
The field of AI that gives computers the ability to understand, interpret and generate human language.
What Is Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?
A type of AI that enables computers to comprehend human language, including its meaning, intent and context.
What Is a Neural Network?
A type of AI that learns to find complex patterns in data, loosely inspired by the structure of the human brain.
O
What Is an Ontology in Computer Science?
A formal system that creates a shared understanding of a knowledge area by defining its key concepts and how they relate.
What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
Technology that converts images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-readable text data.
What Is Overfitting?
Overfitting occurs when an AI model learns its training data so perfectly that it fails to make accurate predictions on new, real-world data.
P
What Are Parameters in AI?
The internal variables an AI model adjusts during training, which together represent what it has learned from data.
What Is Pattern Recognition?
A core function of AI that automatically identifies regularities, rules or recurring structures within data.
What Is Pre-Training?
Training an AI model on a massive, general dataset to give it broad understanding before it is specialized for a task.
What Is Precision in Machine Learning?
Precision is a measure of an AI model's accuracy, specifically for the predictions it identifies as positive or correct.
What Is Predictive Analytics?
Using historical data, statistical algorithms and machine learning to estimate the likelihood of future outcomes.
What Is a Prompt?
A prompt is the instruction, question, or piece of information you give to an AI system to get it to perform a specific task.
What Is Prompt Engineering?
Crafting instructions and questions that guide a generative AI model to produce accurate, relevant and useful output.
R
What Is Recall in Machine Learning?
Recall is a performance metric that measures how effectively an AI model identifies all the truly relevant instances in a dataset.
What Is Reinforcement Learning?
A type of AI that learns the best way to do something through trial and error, guided by rewards and penalties.
What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
A technique that gives an AI language model specific, external information to draw on before it generates a response.
What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Technology that uses software robots to automate the repetitive, rule-based tasks people do on computers.
What Is Robotics?
Robotics is the field of designing, building, and programming machines that can automatically carry out physical tasks in the real world.
What Is a ROC Curve?
A ROC curve is a visual tool used to evaluate the performance of an AI model that makes a "yes or no" decision.
S
What Is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis is the process of using AI to automatically identify and categorize the emotional tone within a piece of writing.
What is a software factory?
The complete delivery system that turns intent into trusted, released software — and what it becomes once agents arrive.
What is spec-driven development?
Building from an executable specification an agent can implement and a pipeline can verify — and why it matters now.
What Is Strong AI?
A theoretical form of AI that could understand, learn and apply its intelligence to solve any problem, just like a human being.
What Is Supervised Learning?
Supervised learning is a type of artificial intelligence where a system learns from data that has been pre-labeled with the correct answers.
What Is a System Prompt?
A system prompt is a set of initial instructions given to an AI model to guide its behavior, personality, and the rules it must follow.
T
What Is Temperature in AI?
Temperature is a setting in AI models that controls the creativity and randomness of its output.
What Is a Token in AI?
A token is a fundamental piece of text, like a word or part of a word, that an AI model uses to process and understand information.
What Is Top-k Sampling?
A technique that makes AI-generated text more varied by choosing each next word from a short list of the most probable options.
What Is Top-p Sampling?
A technique that controls the randomness of AI-generated text by picking the next word from a dynamically sized pool of likely options.
What Is Training Data?
Training data is the collection of examples, such as text, images, or sales figures, used to teach an AI system how to make predictions or decisions.
What Is Transfer Learning?
Transfer learning is a technique for repurposing a pre-existing AI model, trained for one task, to serve as a starting point for a new, related task.
What Is a Transformer Model?
A Transformer is a powerful AI architecture that excels at understanding context and relationships within sequential data, like human language.
What Is the Turing Test?
The Turing test is a test to determine whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.
U
What Is Underfitting?
Underfitting is when an AI model is too simple to capture the underlying patterns in your business data, leading to poor and inaccurate predictions.
What Is Unsupervised Learning?
Unsupervised learning is a type of AI that finds hidden patterns and structures within data without any predefined labels or human guidance.
V
What Is Validation Data?
Validation data is a sample of data used during an AI model's development to fine-tune its settings and check its performance before final testing.
What Is a Vector Database?
A database that stores and searches data by meaning and conceptual relationships, not just exact keywords.
W
What Is Weak AI?
Weak AI, also known as Narrow AI, is an artificial intelligence system designed and trained to perform one specific, focused task.
Z
What Is Zero-Shot Learning?
Zero-shot learning is the ability of an AI model to recognize or classify things it has never been specifically trained on before.
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