AGI: Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is considered the holy grail of AI development. While precise definitions differ, it generally refers to AI that is as or more advanced than human cognition. AI companies such as OpenAI and Google are racing to build the first AGI systems because they could herald a new era of intelligent computing. But while advocates including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claim AGI is just a matter of more computing power and is thus around the corner, others say AGI requires an entirely new paradigm of thinking and is therefore still a ways from being developed.
AI: Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the general set of technologies that use advanced computing to perform tasks. Neural networks, machine learning, large language models (LLMs)—these are all developments that belong under the AI umbrella. While generative AI is a subset of AI, when we say AI we don’t necessarily mean tools that generate content. The history of AI dates back to the 20th century, but advancements beginning in the 1960s led to the capabilities that are available today.
AI agent: A piece of software that uses AI to make rational decisions to complete specific tasks. Agents can interact with their environments and execute autonomously, meaning they don’t need continual prompting like a chatbot. These programs are expected to play a large role in automating a wide range of tasks for businesses.
AI washing: The act of falsely marketing or exaggerating one’s use of AI software, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In early 2024 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began cracking down on firms for making such specious claims, a response to what many view as overhype within the AI space.
Anthropic: The startup behind generative AI model Claude, and a primary competitor of OpenAI. Anthropic has attempted to separate itself by promoting its commitment to responsible AI development. The company has a partnership with WPP and is backed by Amazon and Google.
Related: A generative AI guide for brands
Chatbots: The programs running inside messaging apps and on websites that help consumers perform simple tasks. Chatbots were popularized by apps like Facebook Messenger, and they operate like apps within the messaging services. The recent boom in generative AI bots like ChatGPT is enabling these services to be far more advanced and human-sounding.
ChatGPT: A generative AI bot created by OpenAI, which uses GPT technology (see below) to produce an output based on an input. The platform is trained on vast quantities of text taken from websites, articles, books and other sources. It launched publicly at the end of 2022 and quickly exploded in popularity due to its vast array of capabilities, from screenwriting to joke-telling to disseminating knowledge on basically any topic under the sun.
Related: ChatGPT writes Super Bowl ads
Context window: The upper limit of text that an LLM can process for any single input. LLMs differ in their context windows; Anthropic’s Claude 3 model, for example, can accept up to 200,000 tokens, or about 150,000 words. In comparison, OpenAI”s GPT-4’s context window is 128,000 tokens, or roughly 96,000 words.
DALL-E: Another generative AI bot created by OpenAI, though its function is to generate images. Like ChatGPT, a user queries the bot with an input (e.g. “Ronald McDonald swimming in a river of fire”) and out comes a corresponding image. The first version of DALL-E launched in January 2021; two more versions have since launched.