TechCrunch glossary defines key AI terms, notes ongoing confusion

The Story

TechCrunch has published an updated glossary of artificial intelligence terminology, aiming to clarify common AI terms such as LLM, RAG, RLHF, and AGI. The article notes that definitions for concepts like “AGI” vary among leading AI organizations, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

Key Facts

• The glossary defines artificial general intelligence (AGI) as a nebulous term, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describing it as the “equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.”
• OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” while Google DeepMind views it as “AI that’s at least as capable as humans at most cognitive tasks.”
• An AI agent is a tool that uses AI to perform a series of tasks on behalf of a user, such as filing expenses or booking tickets.
• Chain-of-thought reasoning breaks down problems into smaller steps to improve AI output quality.
• Distillation is a technique that extracts knowledge from a large AI model to train a smaller, more efficient model.
• Hallucination refers to AI models generating incorrect information, often due to gaps in training data.
• The article defines inference as the process of running an AI model to make predictions from previously seen data.
• Large language models (LLMs) are deep neural networks with billions of parameters, used by assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Microsoft Copilot, and Mistral’s Le Chat.

Conflicting Reports

The article reports that definitions for AGI differ among OpenAI (two different definitions) and Google DeepMind, and notes that “AI agent” may mean different things to different people.

Still Unclear

The article does not specify how many AI terms are included in the glossary or how often it is updated. It also notes that infrastructure for AI agents is still being built out, leaving open the question of when these systems will deliver on their full envisioned capabilities.

Misconceptions

No widespread misconceptions addressed in the source article.

Key Figures

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
• OpenAI (organization)
• Google DeepMind (organization)

Sources: TechCrunch