REFERENCE
Jargon buster
If a word is doing more work than it should, it is here. Twelve entries, one line each, no mystique.
| Prompt | The message you type. Nothing more than that. |
|---|---|
| Chatbot | A program that replies in a chat window. |
| Model | The engine behind a chatbot. You never see it directly. |
| Token | A chunk of text, roughly three-quarters of a word. Used for pricing and limits. |
| Hallucination | A confident answer that is simply wrong. |
| Context window | How much text the tool can hold in mind at once. |
| Training data | The material the model learned from, usually years out of date. |
| Fine-tune | Extra training to push a model towards a style or a job. |
| Multimodal | Accepts pictures or sound as well as text. |
| Agent | A setup that takes several steps on its own, such as booking or filling. |
| Open source | A model you can download and run yourself. Not needed for beginners. |
| Copilot | A brand name, now used loosely for any assistant bolted onto software. |
Rule of thumbIf a sentence about AI needs three of these words to make sense, it was written for other people. Ask again in plain English — the tool will comply.