# 10 AI Terms That Put You Ahead of 90% of AI Developers > Source: > Published: 2026-08-05 12:10:10+00:00 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.