Did You Know
Local LLM vs. Cloud LLM
A local LLM runs privately on your own hardware with no usage fees, while a cloud LLM runs on a provider's servers and trades privacy and cost for more capable models.
LLM
12 field notes
Field Notes
Definition
What Does Multimodal Mean?
A multimodal AI understands more than just text — it can take in and respond with images, audio, or video too.
Definition
What Does "Open Weights" Mean?
An open-weights AI model is one you can download and run yourself, though unlike true open source, the training data and recipe usually stay private.
Definition
What Is Hallucination?
Hallucination is when an AI states something false with full confidence, instead of admitting it doesn't know the answer.
Definition
What Is Chunking?
Chunking splits a long document into smaller pieces so an AI system can search and work with just the relevant part instead of the whole thing at once.
Definition
What Is Re-Ranking?
Re-ranking is a second, more careful pass that reorders an initial batch of search results so the best matches end up at the top.
Definition
What Is a Vector Database?
A vector database stores embeddings so AI applications can retrieve information by meaning and similarity instead of exact keywords.
Definition
What Is Semantic Search?
Semantic search matches queries by meaning, helping it find relevant content even when the exact keywords are different.
Definition
What Is an Embedding?
An embedding is a list of numbers that captures a piece of text's meaning, letting an AI system compare ideas by similarity instead of exact word matches.
Definition
What Is Tool Calling?
Tool calling lets an LLM request a specific action instead of just generating text, then wait for the result before continuing — it can't run anything itself.
Definition
What Is an LLM?
An LLM is an AI model trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word — a simple task that, at scale, produces writing, summarizing, and conversation.
Definition
What Is RAG?
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) feeds an LLM relevant external data at query time, so it can answer questions about information it was never trained on.