A-Z AI Glossary

AI Glossary: A to Z An A-to-Z glossary of AI terms, created with help from AI itself. Because in 2026, the best way to study AI is apparently to ask AI itself. 🤣 Written for beginners and practitioners alike. Each term includes a plain English definition and a real-world example. Quick Navigation A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z ↑ Back to top A Term Definition Example Agent (AI Agent) An AI system that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes autonomous actions to achieve a goal A coding agent that writes, runs, and debugs its own code without human intervention AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) A hypothetical AI that can match or exceed human-level intelligence across any task — does not yet exist Often cited as a long-term goal by companies like OpenAI and DeepMind AI (Artificial Intelligence) The field of computer science focused on building machines that can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence ChatGPT writing an essay, an algorithm detecting cancer in X-rays AI Ethics The principles and practices for developing and deploying AI in ways that are fair, transparent, and safe Auditing a hiring algorithm to ensure it doesn't discriminate by gender or race AI Safety The field dedicated to ensuring AI systems remain reliable, controllable, and beneficial as they grow more capable Research into preventing AI from pursuing goals that harm people Alignment The challenge of ensuring an AI system's goals and behaviour match what its designers and users actually intend Preventing a powerful AI from optimising for a metric in a way that causes unintended harm Annotation The process of labelling raw data so it can be used to train supervised learning models Humans drawing bounding boxes around cars in images to train a self-driving model API (Application Programming Interface) A defined interface that lets software systems communicate with each other Calling the OpenAI API to