The Stack
Federated learning is a way to train one shared AI model across thousands of devices or organisations without ever collecting their data in one place — each participant trains a copy on data it already holds, and only a summary of what that training learned travels back. The name comes from
The Guardrails
AI alignment is the work of making a model's behaviour match what the people who built and use it actually intended — not just what they literally asked for. The one-sentence version hides the hard part. Asking is easy. Intending is not. When you tell an assistant to
The Stack
A TPU — Tensor Processing Unit — is a computer chip Google built to do one thing: the enormous matrix multiplications that neural networks run on, done faster and with less electricity than a general-purpose chip can manage. It is the silicon underneath Search, Translate and Gemini, it is what Google
The Guardrails
Mechanistic interpretability is the work of reverse-engineering what actually happens inside a neural network — finding the specific internal parts responsible for a specific answer, rather than inferring everything from the model's behaviour. "Mechanistic" is the load-bearing word: the deliverable is a mechanism, a step-
The Frontier
Multimodal AI is a model that handles more than one kind of input — text, images, audio, video — inside the same system, rather than one model per sense stitched together. "Modality" is just the academic word for a channel of information. Text is a modality. A photograph is a
The Frontier
Artificial intelligence is the goal — getting a machine to do things we would call intelligent — and machine learning is the technique the field now overwhelmingly uses to get there: instead of a programmer writing the rules, the system is handed examples and adjusts itself until its answers get better. The
The Guardrails
A deepfake is video, audio, or image content in which AI makes a real, identifiable person appear to say or do something they never did. The name is short for "deep learning" plus "fake," and the second half of the definition is the part that matters:
The Stack
Temperature is the setting that controls how randomly an AI model picks its next word: near 0 it always takes the most likely word, higher values give unlikely words a real chance, and 1.0 is the default on most APIs. It is the first knob most people turn, and
The Everyday
AI's power use is the electricity burned by the data centers that train and answer with models — about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024, and on track to roughly double by 2030. That sounds small, and per query it is genuinely small. The reason
The Guardrails
AI red teaming is the practice of attacking an AI system on purpose — trying to make it lie, leak data, take dangerous actions, or ignore its own rules — so that the weaknesses get found by the people who can fix them instead of by strangers. The name comes from the
The Frontier
Backpropagation is the algorithm that lets a neural network learn from its mistakes: it measures how wrong the model's answer was, then works backwards through the network to figure out how much each individual connection contributed to that error. Once it knows who is responsible, the model nudges
The Stack
A system prompt is the block of instructions placed in front of a language model before the user says anything — the hidden briefing that decides who the model is pretending to be and what it is allowed to do. You never see it in ChatGPT, Claude, or a support chatbot.