Artificial intelligence
How models are trained, what they cost to run, and the vocabulary that keeps changing meaning.
Entries5 entries
- What is a large language model?A large language model is a neural network trained on very large amounts of text to predict the next token in a sequence. That single objective, applied at scale, produces a system that can summarise, translate, answer q…
- What is an AI agent?An AI agent is a system in which a language model decides which actions to take, executes them through tools, observes the results and repeats until a goal is met or a limit is reached. The distinguishing feature is not …
- What is context engineering?Context engineering is the discipline of deciding what information occupies a model''s context window on each call: instructions, retrieved documents, prior turns, tool definitions, examples and state. It replaces prompt…
- What is inference, and why does it cost what it costs?Inference is running a trained model to produce output. Unlike training, which is a one-off capital cost, inference is a recurring cost paid per request. Providers price it per million input and output tokens, and output…
- What is retrieval-augmented generation?Retrieval-augmented generation is the practice of fetching relevant documents at request time and placing them in the model''s context so the answer is grounded in specific sources rather than in the model''s parameters …