AI glossary / How it works

Unsupervised learning

How it works

Training where the AI finds patterns in data on its own, without being given the right answers.

More words in How it works

• WeightsThe numbers inside a model that hold everything it has learned. Share the weights and you've shared the model.
• World modelAn AI's internal sense of how the world works, which lets it predict what will happen next. Seen as important for robots.
• Agent harnessThe software wrapped around a model that lets it act as an agent. It manages the to-do list, the tools, the memory and the permissions.
• AttentionThe trick inside modern AI that lets it weigh which words in a sentence matter most to each other, so it keeps track of meaning.
• BackpropagationThe way a neural network learns from its mistakes: it works out how wrong it was, then nudges its internal dials to be less wrong next time.