Explainability
How well a system can show why it reached a decision. It matters most where the decision affects somebody — a loan, a diagnosis, a job application — and “the model said so” is not an answer.
Related terms
Neural Network
A system of simple connected units, loosely inspired by the brain, that learns patterns from examples rather than following rules somebody wrote. Nearly all modern AI is built on one.
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing instructions that get reliable results from an AI — being specific, giving examples, saying what to avoid. Less mysterious than it sounds, and mostly the same skill as briefing a new colleague well.
AI Overviews
The written summary Google now places above its search results, assembled from several pages and citing a few of them. Appearing inside one can bring visitors; being left out of one can quietly cost you the clicks you used to get.
Sentiment Analysis
Automatically judging whether text is positive, negative or neutral. Used to read reviews and messages at a scale nobody could read by hand.
Knowledge Graph
A map of things and how they relate — this company, its founder, its address, its services. Search engines and AI systems use one to know that two mentions of a name refer to the same business.
Vector Database
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly. It is the part of an AI search system that decides which of your pages is relevant to a question.