cd /news/artificial-intelligence/10-ai-terms-that-put-you-ahead-of-90… · home topics artificial-intelligence article
[ARTICLE · art-87601] src=pub.towardsai.net ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=· neutral

10 AI Terms That Put You Ahead of 90% of AI Developers

A developer recounts building a chatbot for a small candle business that lied to a customer, prompting a week-long effort to learn 10 fundamental AI terms—including tokens, hallucinations, RAG, AI agents, embeddings, and context windows—in plain English. The guide aims to help beginners avoid similar mistakes by explaining how ChatGPT, Claude, LLMs, and related technologies actually work.

read1 min views1 publishedAug 5, 2026
10 AI Terms That Put You Ahead of 90% of AI Developers
Image: Pub (auto-discovered)

Member-only story

10 AI Terms That Put You Ahead of 90% of AI Developers

A beginner-friendly guide to the 10 AI terms that explain how ChatGPT, Claude, LLMs, RAG, AI agents, embeddings, tokens, and context windows actually work.

My chatbot lied to a customer. I built it myself, and I didn’t catch the lie until an angry email showed up.

I’ve spent a lot of time building AI systems . That didn’t stop a beginner-level mistake from slipping straight past me, one that a total newcomer could have avoided if someone had just explained ten words in plain English first.

Nobody explains them.

Everyone assumes you already know what a token is, why an AI hallucinates, or why RAG matters more than fine-tuning. So this is the real week I spent fixing my mistake, term by term, in the order I learned each one the hard way.

A friend who runs a small candle business from her kitchen table asked me to help her add a chatbot to her website. I said yes without thinking twice.

── more in #artificial-intelligence 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @chatgpt 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/10-ai-terms-that-put…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-08-05 ·