The AI terms that
actually matter.
Clear, technical definitions of 81 key concepts — written by AI engineers, not marketers.
ColBERT (Late Interaction Retrieval)
ColBERT is a retrieval architecture that encodes queries and documents independently into one vector per token, then scores a pair at search time with a cheap operator called MaxSim, keeping token-level precision without paying the cost of a cross-encoder, and forming the basis of the late-interaction retrieval family (ColBERTv2, PLAID, ColPali, ColQwen).
Read definitionComposable AI
Composable AI is an architectural paradigm that replaces monolithic, rigid AI systems with a modular ecosystem of interoperable, reusable components—such as specific models, agents, and data pipelines—that can be assembled and scaled independently.
Read definitionCross-Encoder vs. Bi-Encoder
A bi-encoder encodes a query and a document separately into vectors compared by a fast distance metric, while a cross-encoder feeds the query and document into the model together so it can attend across both; the tradeoff between the two, speed and scale versus accuracy, shapes almost every retrieval and reranking pipeline.
Read definitionDeepSeek V4
DeepSeek V4 is an open-source Mixture-of-Experts model family released in April 2026, with the flagship V4-Pro reaching 1.6 trillion total parameters and matching closed-source frontier models on coding and reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of the inference cost.
Read definitionDense Retrieval vs. Sparse Retrieval
Dense retrieval finds documents by comparing learned vector embeddings for semantic similarity, while sparse retrieval finds documents by matching weighted terms (like BM25) in an inverted index; modern search and RAG systems increasingly fuse both rather than picking one.
Read definitiondGSLM (Dialogue Generative Spoken Language Model)
dGSLM is a full-duplex generative spoken language model that uses a Siamese dual-encoder architecture with cross-attention to model both sides of a spoken dialogue simultaneously, without any text in the loop.
Read definitionDiffusionGemma
An experimental, open weights multimodal model by Google DeepMind that utilizes discrete text diffusion instead of autoregression to generate 256 token blocks in parallel. This enables extreme inference speeds.
Read definitionEmbeddings
Embeddings are dense numerical vectors that represent the meaning of text, images, or other data in a high-dimensional space — where items that are semantically similar end up geometrically close together, enabling AI systems to measure meaning rather than just match keywords.
Read definitionFlash Attention
Flash Attention is an I/O-aware, exact attention algorithm that fundamentally solves the memory wall in Transformer models. By fusing operations and minimizing costly reads/writes between the GPU's High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM, it significantly speeds up processing and enables massive context windows.
Read definitionGemma 4
Gemma 4 is Google DeepMind's fourth-generation family of open-weight multimodal AI models, spanning four sizes (E2B, E4B, 26B MoE, 31B Dense), built from the same research as Gemini 3 and designed for advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, and on-device deployment.
Read definitionGenerative AI (Gen AI)
Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that creates new content or data patterns mimicking human-like creativity, based on learned information from existing datasets.
Read definitionGenerative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing content to be discovered, retrieved, and cited by AI-driven generative search engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews.
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