Glossary
AI terms, quickly explained
Short definitions for the ideas that keep appearing in AI news, research, tools, policy, and safety updates.
- AI agent
- An AI system that can plan steps, use tools, and work toward a goal with less step-by-step prompting from a person.
- Benchmark
- A structured test used to compare how well AI systems perform on a task. Benchmarks are useful, but they can become stale or too easy over time.
- Model release
- A public launch or update of an AI model, often with new capabilities, pricing, safety notes, or developer access.
- Source freshness
- The gap between when the original source was published and when The AI Tea published its explanation. News posts must use sources no older than 14 days.
- Primary source
- The original announcement, paper, documentation, report, or policy page behind a story, rather than a secondhand summary.
- RAG
- Retrieval-augmented generation: a method where an AI system looks up documents or data before answering, so the response can be grounded in specific sources.
- Open-weight model
- A model whose trained weights are publicly available under a license, allowing developers to run, inspect, or adapt it more directly than a closed API model.
- Evaluation
- A process for testing an AI system’s capability, safety, reliability, or limitations before or after release.