AI glossary / How it works

Supervised learning

How it works

Training with examples that come with the right answers attached, such as photos already labelled cat or dog.

More words in How it works

• Synthetic dataArtificially generated data used for training when real data is scarce, expensive or private.
• Test-time computeLetting a model think for longer on a hard question to get a better answer, at the cost of speed and money.
• TokenThe small chunks of text an AI reads and writes in, roughly three-quarters of a word each. Limits and prices are usually counted in tokens.
• TokenizationChopping text into tokens before a model reads it.
• TrainingThe learning stage, where a model is shown vast numbers of examples and adjusts itself until it gets good at the task.