AI, explained in plain English.

225 AI words, the latest AI news and the tools that matter, written for people who don't work in tech.

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Our new AI can work with pictures as well as words, looks things up before it answers, can keep more of your conversation in mind, and makes fewer things up.

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225 words explained, 5 news stories and 4 new tools.

Word of the day
Training

The learning stage, where a model is shown vast numbers of examples and adjusts itself until it gets good at the task.

Lost in the jargon?

225 AI words, each explained the way you'd explain it to a friend. Start with the 17 that matter most.

Browse all 225 words, A to Z

Test yourself

Five quick questions on the words that matter most. No sign-up, no pressure, and you can retake it as often as you like.

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Which word means this?

AI that creates new things, such as text, images, music, video or code, rather than only sorting or analysing what already exists.

Latest AI news

Live headlines from trusted sources, updated through the day, plus a round-up every other Friday that explains what actually matters.

New round-up every other Friday

Live headlines

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The latest round-up

Hand-picked stories with a plain answer to "so what?". Dotted words open in the glossary.
Everyday AI25 Sep

Meta's new AI assistant is the most downloaded app in America

Full story at AI Agent Store weekly round-up

Muse, Meta's personal app, hit the top of the US free iPhone chart with around 730,000 downloads in five days, ahead of , and Grok.

Why it matters: A reminder that AI assistants are now mainstream consumer apps, not niche tools. If your family is using one, it may well be this.

Try it yourself: Ask any assistant to do something dull for you, such as turning a photo of a receipt into a list. Small jobs show you what it is actually good at.

Rules16 Sep

California ads must now say when the actor isn't real

Governor Newsom signed a law requiring adverts to say clearly when a realistic AI-generated person or voice plays a prominent part. It follows a similar New York rule and starts on 1 January 2027.

Why it matters: You will start seeing AI labels on adverts. It is one of the first laws that changes what ordinary people see day to day.

Try it yourself: Next advert break, try to spot which faces and voices might be . It is harder than you think.

Full story at Davis+Gilbert alert

Politics23 Sep

US senators propose banning superintelligent AI outright

Senators Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar introduced a bill to prohibit AI that beats humans at most thinking tasks, pause advanced development until federal safety rules exist, and create a government department for AI.

Why it matters: Introducing a bill is a long way from passing one, but it shows has moved from science fiction to draft legislation.

Try it yourself: Ask a chatbot to explain the difference between and today's AI, then check its answer against our glossary.

Full story at AI Weekly, 25 Sep edition

Big tech25 Sep

Zuckerberg rejects calls to slow AI down

Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea of a coordinated industry slowdown in an NBC News interview, breaking with other frontier lab leaders. Separately, Xi Jinping told Donald Trump that both countries have a duty to keep AI under human control.

Why it matters: Two weeks ago OpenAI's boss floated slowing down. The industry clearly does not agree with itself, and that disagreement shapes what gets released to you.

Try it yourself: Notice who benefits from each position. Companies furthest ahead often argue for caution, and those catching up rarely do.

Full story at AI Weekly, 25 Sep edition

Safety25 Sep

The simple fixes matter more than the fancy ones

As AI labs promote independent safety audits, security experts point out that most recent mishaps came from ordinary mistakes: too many permissions, unrestricted internet access, weak monitoring and badly set up .

Why it matters: You do not need deep technical knowledge to stay safer. Checking what an AI tool is allowed to reach does most of the work.

Try it yourself: Open the settings of any AI tool you have connected to email, files or calendar, and switch off anything it does not need.

Full story at MarketingProfs weekly AI update

New tools and updates

Things that launched or changed recently, and what you can actually do with them.

Apple15 Sep

The new Siri is in public beta

Apple opened the English public beta of its rebuilt Siri, powered by models made with Google's . Some requests are handled on your device and some on Apple's private servers.

Not available in the EU on several devices yet, more languages are due next month, and some features have daily limits.

Try it yourself: On an iPhone, you can join Apple's public beta programme to try it. Back up your phone first, as betas can be buggy.

Source: AI Weekly

Perplexity15 Sep

An AI agent that runs on your own PC

Perplexity's agent now runs inside its Windows app as a , so tasks stay on your computer. It asks permission before sending anything to the cloud.

You'll need a high-end Nvidia graphics card with at least 24GB of memory, so this is one for powerful PCs.

Try it yourself: Check your graphics card: on Windows press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, open Performance, choose GPU and look at dedicated memory.

Source: AI Weekly

MetaSeptember

Muse, an agent inside WhatsApp

Meta introduced Muse, an that lives in WhatsApp and keeps working on a task after you close the chat.

A sign of where assistants are heading: you hand over a job and check back later.

Try it yourself: If it has reached your region, start with a low-stakes job, such as planning a week of meals.

Source: AI Daily Post

CohereSeptember

A free-to-download translation model

Cohere released North Small Translate, an model built for translation.

Open-weight means developers can run it themselves, which usually leads to cheaper translation features in everyday apps.

Try it yourself: Not a developer? You will feel this when the apps you use get better at translation. Developers can find download details on Cohere's website.

Source: AI Daily Post

Why this site exists

I work in tech. Even inside the industry, the language moved faster than anyone could explain it: one month it was chatbots, the next it was agents, RAG and context windows, and nobody stopped to define anything.

If it is confusing for people who build software for a living, it is far worse for everyone else. And AI is too important to be understood only by the people who already speak the language.

So AI Tipbits does one job: it translates. Every word explained simply, the week's news without the hype, and a source on everything so you can check it yourself.

  • Plain English, always. If a sentence needs a second read, we rewrite it.
  • Sources on everything. Every story links to where it came from, so you can check it yourself.
  • No sponsored stories. Nobody pays to appear here. If that ever changes, it will be clearly labelled.
  • A rhythm we keep. A new round-up every other Friday, with the date on every story.