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.
Related terms
Grounding
Giving an AI real source material to answer from, instead of letting it rely on memory. A grounded answer can be checked and cited; an ungrounded one is where hallucinations come from.
Answer Engine
An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are all answer engines. The old question was “do we rank?”; the new one is “are we the answer?”
Organization Schema
Structured data describing the business itself: name, logo, address, contact details, social profiles. The single most useful markup for being recognised, and the one most small sites are missing.
Speech Recognition
Turning spoken words into text. It underpins voice search, dictation and call transcription, and it now handles accents and background noise far better than it used to.
Inference
The moment an AI actually answers, as opposed to when it was trained. Training happens once and costs a fortune; inference happens every time somebody asks, and is what you pay for per use.
Watermarking
Marking AI-generated content so it can be identified later, often invisibly. Part of the same effort as provenance, and equally early.