Hallucination

Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting technique that encourages an LLM to break down complex reasoning into intermediate steps before arriving at a final answer. By explicitly reasoning through each step, models achieve significantly better accuracy on math, logic, and multi-step problems. Extended thinking and "thinking" tokens in models like Claude represent a built-in form of chain-of-thought reasoning.

The transformer is a neural network architecture introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" that revolutionized natural language processing. Unlike recurrent networks, transformers process entire sequences in parallel using a self-attention mechanism, which allows them to capture long-range dependencies efficiently. Virtually all modern LLMs, including GPT and Claude, are built on the transformer architecture.

Multimodal AI refers to models that can process and generate multiple types of data — such as text, images, audio, and video — within a single system. Models like GPT-4o and Claude can accept both text and image inputs, enabling use cases like visual question answering, document analysis, and UI understanding. This convergence is blurring the lines between previously separate AI disciplines.

An embedding is a dense numerical vector representation of data — such as text, images, or code — in a high-dimensional space where semantically similar items are positioned closer together. Embeddings are fundamental to semantic search, recommendation systems, and RAG pipelines. They are generated by specialized models and typically stored in vector databases for efficient similarity lookups.

Generative AI is a category of artificial intelligence that creates new content — text, images, code, music, or video — rather than just analyzing or classifying existing data. Powered by architectures like transformers and diffusion models, generative AI has transformed software development with tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor. It represents a shift from AI as a classification tool to AI as a creative collaborator.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. NLP powers applications like chatbots, translation services, sentiment analysis, and text summarization. Modern NLP has been transformed by transformer-based models, which achieve remarkable performance on tasks that previously required extensive hand-crafted rules.