Hands-on tutorials for Claude Code, AI agents, cloud and system design
Large language models have transformed how we interact with technology, enabling machines to understand and generate human-like text with remarkable fluency. These powerful AI systems underpin tools like ChatGPT and are reshaping education, business, and creative work. In this lesson, you will learn what large language models are, how they work, and how to use… Continue reading
AI jargon is scattered across papers, release notes, and vendor docs, and each source assumes you already know the other half of the vocabulary. This AI glossary gathers the language of modern LLM work into sixteen short lessons: every term gets a one or two sentence definition, the terms people mix up are paired and… Continue reading
You open any explainer on this site, whether it is LLM Concepts: A Deep Dive or Machine Learning System Design 101, and within two paragraphs the vocabulary starts stacking up: loss, gradient, pretraining, scaling laws. This first glossary lesson pins down those model training terms, one or two plain sentences each, so the rest of… Continue reading
Every explainer on this site, starting with LLM Concepts: A Deep Dive, leans on architecture vocabulary: attention, heads, KV cache, mixture of experts. This second glossary lesson collects the transformer terms behind those phrases, the older neural network words they grew out of, and the newer designs competing for the job. Each entry gets a… Continue reading
Usage meters, rate limits, and pricing tables on this site, starting with LLM Concepts: A Deep Dive, all count tokens, never words. This third glossary lesson collects the tokenization terms behind that count: how raw text becomes the units a model consumes, which hidden tokens ride along in every request, and the vocabulary for the… Continue reading
When a lab reports a training run that occupied thousands of GPUs for months, a whole vocabulary hides inside that sentence. How ChatGPT Works walks through the infrastructure on this site; this fourth glossary lesson supplies the LLM training terms such writeups assume: the optimizer’s controls, the memory tricks, the ways one model gets sliced… Continue reading
The shortest path from a raw model to a useful answer runs through the request you send it, and an entire craft has grown around that seam. This fifth glossary lesson collects the prompting terms: the anatomy of a request, the reasoning patterns that raise answer quality, and the newer vocabulary for managing the whole… Continue reading
Ask a search system for pages about “hiring policy” and it needs some way to match that phrase against documents that never use those words. Embeddings are that bridge, and this sixth glossary lesson collects the embedding terms around them: what the vectors are, how search runs over them, and the reranking vocabulary wrapped around… Continue reading
Ask this site how RAG works and you get a full mechanism walkthrough; ask what the surrounding vocabulary means and you land here. This seventh glossary lesson collects the RAG terms that fill vendor docs, product notes, and our own RAG writing practices on AWS, from grounding to lost in the middle. Each entry gets… Continue reading
This site has taught the mechanisms at length: how AI agents work end to end, and what an MCP server actually is. This eighth glossary lesson does the lighter job: the agent terms themselves, from planning to handoffs to the protocols that let agents reach tools and each other. Each entry is a sentence or… Continue reading
This domain has its own series on the site: start with Learn LLM Inference and work through to serving engines. This ninth glossary lesson handles the vocabulary itself, the inference terms that appear in API references, model cards, and GPU invoices: sampling dials, prefill and decode, batching, quantization, and the economics at the end of… Continue reading
No mechanism post on this site teaches fine-tuning end to end yet; the nearest neighbor is how vertical small language models work, where adaptation is the whole business case. For the bigger picture of tuned versus prompted behavior, our LLM concepts deep dive rounds it out. This tenth glossary lesson therefore carries the vocabulary itself:… Continue reading
Model releases describe a strange second life: a base model finishes pretraining, then goes through a round of tuning that changes its manners completely. That second life is where the alignment terms live; the values side of the story continues in our lesson on responsible AI use. Our reinforcement learning explainer covers the machinery these… Continue reading
Every model launch arrives holding a fistful of numbers: an MMLU score here, an Arena rank there, a pass rate on a coding set. Our evals explainer shows you how to build an evaluation for your own workload; this lesson gives you the LLM evaluation terms for reading everyone’s. The LLM concepts deep dive shows… Continue reading
Ship an AI feature and two vocabularies arrive together: the safety language from our responsible AI guide and the attacker language that fills hardening guides like this AgentCore walkthrough. This lesson separates the families and adds a third: the AI safety terms researchers use when they open a trained network and look at the wiring…. Continue reading
Ask a reasoning model a hard question and it pauses, works, and only then answers. The pause has a vocabulary now, and it shows up in two places you may already know from this site: the ReAct paper, where a model alternates thinking with acting, and Claude’s effort dial, which is a reasoning budget wearing… Continue reading
Feed a notebook of PDFs, slides, and a recorded lecture to NotebookLM and it answers questions about all of them at once. That product moment is where most readers first meet the multimodal AI terms in this lesson, which stretch across three territories: models that handle images, systems that handle speech, and models that handle… Continue reading
A model that works in a notebook is a demo; the vocabulary in our machine learning system design primer is what it wears once real traffic arrives, and the AgentOps guide shows the same words repurposed for agents. This final lesson gathers the LLMOps terms and the infrastructure language around them: the chips, the lifecycle,… Continue reading