The Stack
An NPU is a chip built for one job: running the math that neural networks do, at a fraction of the power a general-purpose CPU or a graphics GPU would burn. The name covers anything from the block inside your phone's processor to a USB stick in
The Stack
Tool calling — also called function calling — is a language model's ability to say "I need this specific external action run, with these exact arguments" instead of answering from memory. The model does not run anything. It writes a structured request in a format your code agreed
The Stack
LoRA is a way of customizing an AI model by training a tiny add-on instead of rewriting the whole thing — the base model's weights stay frozen, and a small pair of "adapter" matrices carries the change. If you have read that someone "dropped a
The Stack
HBM is the stacked memory package that an AI accelerator's processor can read from and write to many times faster than normal RAM — and right now it is the single most expensive, scarcest part of the AI buildout. If you have read that the memory shortage is raising
The Stack
A diffusion language model writes text the way an image generator paints a picture: it starts with a block of noise and refines the whole thing over several passes, instead of typing one word at a time left to right. Almost every AI you have used does the typing. This
The Stack
Robotics companies shipped at least ten "world models" between May and August. The phrase is now everywhere in AI — and means three different things depending on who says it. A world model is a learned internal simulation of an environment: give it what you see and what you&
The Frontier
A transformer is the neural network design almost every modern AI system is built on — an architecture that lets a model look at every word in its input at once and decide which other words matter for understanding it. That mechanism is called attention, and it is the reason AI
The Guardrails
AI regulation is the set of laws, rules, and government oversight mechanisms that decide what AI systems may be built, how they must be tested and labeled, and who is on the hook when they cause harm. It is not one law — it is a patchwork, and right now the
The Stack
An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of something — a word, a sentence, a photo, a song — so a computer can compare meanings using arithmetic. The rule is simple and surprisingly powerful: things that mean similar things get similar lists of numbers. That's the
The Stack
If you've ever wondered why an LLM feels slow to type out long answers — or why Nvidia's engineers spent a September 2026 blog post telling model designers how many attention groups to use — the answer is a technique called speculative decoding. Speculative decoding is an inference
The Frontier
If you read AI news for a week, you'll see the same strange nouns over and over: SWE-bench, Terminal-Bench, GPQA, FrontierMath. Every model launch ships a table of percentages. Nobody explains what the test actually is. An AI benchmark is a fixed set of tasks with
The Stack
A local LLM is an AI model that runs on hardware you own — the actual math happens on your laptop, phone, or server. A cloud API is the same kind of model running on someone else's machines, which you reach over the internet and pay for by the