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Glossary

Science and tech terms you hear in the news, explained as clearly as possible. Each comes with pictures and a quick quiz, so you can check that you got it.

AI6

• AI agentIt is a setup in which, once you give it a goal, an AI decides what to do next, uses a tool, looks at the result and decides again, repeating this to get the work done.
• Artificial general intelligence (AGI)It is a single AI that can handle many different kinds of thinking tasks about as well as people, or better.
• HallucinationIt is when an AI such as ChatGPT gives a wrong answer that sounds true and confident.
• Large language model (LLM)It is a very large AI that has practiced guessing “the next word” on an enormous amount of text, and so has learned to read and write.
• Recursive self-improvement (RSI)It is when an AI builds a next AI that is better than itself, and that new AI builds an even better one, again and again.
• TokenA token is a small piece of text that an AI uses when it reads and writes.