What is GenAI and why did they call it that?
A short guide to AI words and terms you should know.
If you’ve ever had to come up with a name for something—a business, a brand, a baby, a group chat—you know that it’s not easy to find the perfect word or phrase that describes or explains exactly what it is to other people.
Also, all the really good names for things, like newspaper, e-mail, brunch and doorknob, were invented before the 2000s, so now we’re left with vague and weird-sounding names, like podcast, onesie and situationship.
AI language is no different. To help us all out, I’ve created this short list of words and terms that you should know if you want to get better at understanding AI:
The ABCs of AI
AI: Artificial Intelligence
According to AI itself, artificial intelligence refers to “machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, making decisions, and learning from experience.”
What tech people mean when they say “AI”: literally anything relating to computers or technology that’s designed to work better or faster than humans.ChatGPT: an AI language model developed by OpenAI, designed to understand and generate human-like text based on prompts.
What tech people mean when they talk about ChatGPT: Since ChatGPT was the first of its kind, people sometimes use “ChatGPT” to talk broadly about all types of these AI language models, even if they’re not ChatGPT. It’s like using the word “car” as a catchall term to talk about trucks, vans, SUVs and my preferred mode of motorized transportation: limousines.Deep Learning: a subset of machine learning (see below).
Deep learning is an AI method that teaches computers to process data in a way that simulates the human brain.
What tech people mean when they say “deep learning”: “We’re trying to train this AI model to process and synthesize data in a way that doesn’t just work like the average human brain, but like a way more intelligent one. The brain of a human who is deep, man. Like, they read a lot of books and have layers to them. They’re complex and would probably be played by Ethan Hawke in a movie.”GenAI: Generative AI
GenAI refers to AI technologies that generate new content. This includes text, images, music, voices and videos. ChatGPT falls under the GenAI category, hence why people often use the term “GenAI” to talk more broadly about ChatGPT, DALL-E and these types of tools.
What tech people mean when talking about GenAI: “Creativity is expensive $$$. Let’s train AI to do it so we don’t have to pay writers, painters, graphic designers, actors, filmmakers—literally anyone who dares to call themselves an ‘artist’. We’re not gonna give these so-called ‘creatives’ a single cent for their unique artistic talent. We’d rather spend billions of dollars training computers to do it because we think it will be cheaper in the long run.”LLM: Large Language Model
Not to be confused with MLMs, M&Ms or Lululemon, LLMs are advanced AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data to understand, generate, and interact with human language at a high level of proficiency.
What tech people mean when they talk about LLMs: “We spent A LOT of time and money building this thing so it better work perfectly and not have any errors and crush our competitors so that we become the one LLM to RULE THEM ALL.”Machine Learning: a branch of AI and computer science that focuses on using data and algorithms.
According to the smart people at MIT: “Machine learning is behind chatbots and predictive text, language translation apps, the shows Netflix suggests to you, and how your social media feeds are presented. It powers autonomous vehicles and machines that can diagnose medical conditions based on images.”
What tech people mean when they’re talking about machine learning: “Hey, let’s just get the computer to teach itself so we don’t have to train it. It’s time for my lunch break.”Prompt engineering: inputting code or text (prompts) to guide AI models toward producing specific desired outputs.
Getting good at prompts is super important to using ChatGPT and other GenAI tools effectively (hence why this newsletter is called Prompt Me).
What tech people mean when they use the word “prompt”: “Hey, let’s force everyone use word math to help GenAI make something that isn’t as good as if a human created it, but pretty close.”
Alright, there’s a lot more AI terminology than this, but these are the main words and terms you need to understand to sound like you know what you’re talking about when it comes to GenAI and ChatGPT.
Happy prompting :)
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