AI 101 — The AI Glossary: every AI term, plainly explained

The canonical, plain-English reference for every term in modern AI — from tokens to agents, RAG to open-weight models. 27 entries, all sourced, all updated.

SiliconNoon's AI 101 Glossary

AI 101 — The AI Glossary

SiliconNoon's free, plain-English reference for the most-asked terms in modern artificial intelligence. Every entry is short, sourced, and updated regularly — written for journalists, investors, and engineers who need the right definition fast.

Whether you want a one-line answer to “what is a token?” or a fuller read on fine-tuning, RAG, agents, or open-weight models, this is the page to bookmark. Each term links to a dedicated explainer with a working example, the math when it helps, and the trade-offs you should actually care about.

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Local LLMs vs cloud APIs: what's the difference?

Why this page exists

AI terminology moves fast. New jargon — context windows, MCP, open-weight models, sandbox escape — shows up in headlines before the previous cycle has explained it. This glossary is where we keep the canonical answer.

If a term is missing, tell us and we'll write it.

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Akhetonics says its all-optical CPU reaches a customer in 2026

Akhetonics says its all-optical CPU reaches a customer in 2026

Light-based computing keeps promising more than it delivers — but one Munich startup has just put a date on its bet, and the interview laying it out is doing the rounds on Hacker News this week. Akhetonics says it will deploy its first commercial machine with a major customer by the end of 2026, with several more planned for 2027. The company, founded by Michael Kissner and Leonardo Del Bino, is building a computer where data enters as light, is switched as light, and circulates through memory

The Week in AI — October 5–11, 2026

The Week in AI — October 5–11, 2026

Every big claim this week turned out to rest on fine print more interesting than the headline: revenue only the company reporting it can define, safety tests sandboxed while the product keeps the web, and a Pentagon phase-out nobody would confirm until reporters kept asking. The week's top 5 1. OpenAI's revenue was $20 billion below the numbers everyone quoted — and the gap was definitional. The Financial Times reported Thursday that OpenAI's annualized revenue runs roughly $20 billion unde

Drone strike shuts a third Yandex data center, taking YandexGPT offline

Drone strike shuts a third Yandex data center, taking YandexGPT offline

Russia's largest tech company is learning what the AI era's infrastructure war looks like from the receiving end — three data centers in four days, and with them much of the cloud layer Russian businesses run on. A Ukrainian drone strike knocked out Yandex's data center in Vladimir early Sunday morning, the third of the company's facilities hit since October 8. The site — reported at roughly 50 MW and designed for about 2,880 server racks — stopped operating completely after the attack, Yandex

Agent teams cost up to 5x more, barely score higher

Agent teams cost up to 5x more, barely score higher

The multi-agent hype train hit a benchmark this weekend — and the grid and the trucking regulators had quiet weeks of their own. Vals AI put agent teams head-to-head with single agents on its Vibe Code Bench, and the teams cost between 1.8 and 5.1 times more for almost no extra quality. The evals company ran GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 solo and in teams across 50 apps at two reasoning efforts; out of four comparisons, only one was statistically significant — Sol at medium effort, where the t