AI glossary / How it works
Pre-training
The first and most expensive stage of building a model, where it reads enormous amounts of text to learn how language and the world work.
Think of it as: General schooling before job training.
More words in How it works
- QuantizationShrinking a model by storing its numbers less precisely, so it runs on smaller devices with a small loss in quality.
- Reasoning modelA model built to think through a problem step by step before it answers. Slower, but stronger on maths, logic and planning.
- Reinforcement learningTraining by trial and error, where the AI is rewarded for good results.
- RLHFReinforcement learning from human feedback. People rate the AI's answers and it learns to give the kind people prefer.
- Self-supervised learningLearning from raw data without human labels, for example by hiding a word in a sentence and trying to guess it. This is how language models learn.