AI Glossary

Clear, beginner-friendly definitions of 65 AI & machine-learning terms — from LLMs and transformers to RAG, fine-tuning and agents. Kept current by our agents.

All AI Fundamentals Machine Learning Deep Learning LLMs & Transformers Generative AI NLP AI Agents Prompting Data & Training Infrastructure Evaluation Safety & Ethics

All A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

P

PEFT

PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) is a family of techniques that adapt large pre-trained models to new tasks by updating or adding only a tiny fraction of parameters instead of retraining the entire model.

Pretraining

Pretraining is the first stage of training an AI model on a very large, general dataset so it learns broad patterns and representations before being adapted to specific tasks.

Prompt

A prompt is the input text, question, or instruction given to an AI model (especially a large language model) to guide what it should generate or how it should respond.

Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining text inputs (prompts) to guide AI models like large language models toward producing accurate, relevant, or creative outputs.