How models work

Constitutional AI

A training approach, published by Anthropic in 2022, in which a model critiques and revises its own responses against a written set of principles, and AI-generated feedback partly replaces human ratings. The aim is to make the values guiding behaviour more explicit.


Related terms

Attention

The mechanism in a transformer that lets the model weigh how relevant each token is to every other token when working …

Backpropagation

The technique that calculates how much each weight in a neural network contributed to an error, working backwards from…

Base model

A model straight out of pretraining, before it has been tuned to follow instructions or hold a conversation. Given a q…

Chain of thought

Step-by-step reasoning written out before a final answer, either prompted ('think it through step by step') or built i…

Compute

Shorthand for the processing power used to train and run AI models, usually on large clusters of specialised chips in …

Diffusion model

The main approach behind modern image and video generators. It learns to reverse a process of gradually adding noise t…

Beyond the definition

Knowing the word is the easy part

A short assessment scores you across five skill areas and builds a path through 18 modules, skipping whatever you already know. Free, no card.

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