AI 101 - SiliconNoon (Page 3)

The Stack

AI 101 — What is temperature in an LLM?

Temperature is the setting that controls how randomly an AI model picks its next word: near 0 it always takes the most likely word, higher values give unlikely words a real chance, and 1.0 is the default on most APIs. It is the first knob most people turn, and the one most people misunderstand. Why it matters right now. Temperature has been showing up in the news all week as a variable, not a feature. A Lasso Security study found that switching on SynthID-Text watermarking changed how models be

The Everyday

AI 101 — How Much Power Does AI Actually Use?

AI's power use is the electricity burned by the data centers that train and answer with models — about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024, and on track to roughly double by 2030. That sounds small, and per query it is genuinely small. The reason it keeps making front pages is where the demand lands: a handful of regional grids, the bills of the people living on them, and the cost of running the machines in the first place. This is the ten-minute version. Why it matters right now. Three thi

The Guardrails

AI 101 — What is AI red teaming?

AI red teaming is the practice of attacking an AI system on purpose — trying to make it lie, leak data, take dangerous actions, or ignore its own rules — so that the weaknesses get found by the people who can fix them instead of by strangers. The name comes from the war-game convention of a "red team" playing the adversary so the "blue team" defending the system gets a realistic test. In AI, the red team's weapon is usually language: prompts, documents, emails, tool outputs, web pages. Why it

The Frontier

AI 101 — What is backpropagation?

Backpropagation is the algorithm that lets a neural network learn from its mistakes: it measures how wrong the model's answer was, then works backwards through the network to figure out how much each individual connection contributed to that error. Once it knows who is responsible, the model nudges each connection a little in the direction that would have made the answer less wrong. Do that billions of times and you get a language model. Almost every claim you read about AI training — a model "

The Stack

AI 101 — What is a system prompt?

A system prompt is the block of instructions placed in front of a language model before the user says anything — the hidden briefing that decides who the model is pretending to be and what it is allowed to do. You never see it in ChatGPT, Claude, or a support chatbot. But when a product answers "I can only help with billing questions" or refuses to discuss a competitor, that behavior is almost always the system prompt talking, not the model's own opinion. Why it matters right now The system p

The Stack

AI 101 — What is an NPU (neural processing unit)?

An NPU is a chip built for one job: running the math that neural networks do, at a fraction of the power a general-purpose CPU or a graphics GPU would burn. The name covers anything from the block inside your phone's processor to a USB stick in a robot to a rack card in a datacenter. Vendors also call it an AI accelerator or a neural engine, and it is the hardware reason "on-device AI" stopped being a marketing phrase. Why this matters right now The NPU is the quiet spec war of 2026. Microsof

The Stack

AI 101 — What is tool calling?

Tool calling — also called function calling — is a language model's ability to say "I need this specific external action run, with these exact arguments" instead of answering from memory. The model does not run anything. It writes a structured request in a format your code agreed to in advance, and your code does the doing. That one handshake is what turns a chatbot into software that can book, query, calculate, and file. Why it matters right now Every agent story you read this month rests on

The Stack

AI 101 — What is LoRA (low-rank adaptation)?

LoRA is a way of customizing an AI model by training a tiny add-on instead of rewriting the whole thing — the base model's weights stay frozen, and a small pair of "adapter" matrices carries the change. If you have read that someone "dropped a LoRA" to teach an image model a new style, or that a community fine-tune of an open-weight model was trained on a single GPU, LoRA is the technique underneath. It is the most common word in open-source model customization, and this is the ten-minute versio

The Stack

AI 101 — What is HBM (high-bandwidth memory)?

HBM is the stacked memory package that an AI accelerator's processor can read from and write to many times faster than normal RAM — and right now it is the single most expensive, scarcest part of the AI buildout. If you have read that the memory shortage is raising chip prices, throttling roadmaps, or forcing startups to rethink fabs, HBM is the "memory" in that sentence. This is the ten-minute version. It matters today for one plain reason: every frontier AI chip depends on it, and there is no

The Stack

AI 101 — What is a diffusion language model?

A diffusion language model writes text the way an image generator paints a picture: it starts with a block of noise and refines the whole thing over several passes, instead of typing one word at a time left to right. Almost every AI you have used does the typing. This is the main rival design, and in the last week it went from research curiosity to something running real phone calls and coding agents. The reason it is in the news is Inception's Mercury 2.5 release, which the company calls the m

The Stack

AI 101 — What is a world model?

Robotics companies shipped at least ten "world models" between May and August. The phrase is now everywhere in AI — and means three different things depending on who says it. A world model is a learned internal simulation of an environment: give it what you see and what you're about to do, and it predicts what the world looks like next. That's the one-sentence version. A language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state — the next camera frame, the next joint angle, t

The Frontier

AI 101 — What is a transformer?

A transformer is the neural network design almost every modern AI system is built on — an architecture that lets a model look at every word in its input at once and decide which other words matter for understanding it. That mechanism is called attention, and it is the reason AI went from clunky to conversational. The name comes from a 2017 paper by eight researchers at Google, titled "Attention Is All You Need." Before it, language models read text one word at a time, in order, like someone run

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