The Founder's AI Vocabulary: 50 Terms You Need to Know

Stop nodding along in AI conversations. Learn 50 essential terms. Glossary format. Bookmark this.

Core AI Concepts

• LLM (Large Language Model): AI trained on billions of text examples
• Prompt: Instructions you give to AI
• Token: A chunk of text (roughly 4 characters = 1 token)
• Temperature: Randomness of AI responses (0 = predictable, 1 = creative)

Cost & Optimization

• Token usage: How many tokens your request uses (charged per million)
• Caching: Reusing long context to save money
• Batch processing: Processing many requests at once, cheaper
• Rate limiting: Maximum requests per minute

Quality & Architecture

• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): AI searches your docs before answering
• Fine-tuning: Training AI on your specific data
• Hallucination: AI making up facts confidently
• Embeddings: Converting text to numbers for comparison

More Terms...

Model, provider, API, inference, context window, system prompt, output format, JSON parsing, and 40+ more explained clearly.