6 AI Terms Everyone Uses Right Now, But Almost Nobody Can Actually Explain
Last Updated on June 3, 2026 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Divy Yadav
Originally published on Towards AI.
Understanding these six concepts puts you ahead of most people learning AI in 2026.
Most people can use words like RAG, embeddings, and context window in a sentence.
The article argues that these commonly used AI terms are often repeated without being understood, and that knowing them helps you identify problems and ask better questions. It then explains a “stack” of six core concepts—embeddings (turning text meaning into numeric vectors), context window (the limited text a model can see at once, including the “lost in the middle” issue), RAG (retrieving relevant documents and injecting them into the prompt, while noting it doesn’t inherently prevent hallucinations), fine-tuning (further training on specialized data to shape behavior rather than add new knowledge), inference (running a fixed trained model to generate outputs and the cost/infrastructure implications), and agents (multi-step systems that decide and act with minimal human intervention). Finally, it connects the terms as interdependent parts of real production AI, emphasizing that most people miss this layer and therefore misunderstand what they’re hearing in AI conversations.
Read the full blog for free on Medium.
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