Every AI Buzzword You Have Been Afraid Of Is a Dot Product in a Costume. Here Are 15 of Them, Unmasked.
Last Updated on June 22, 2026 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Dr Swarneendu AI
Originally published on Towards AI.
The entire AI industry runs on one operation. One. Multiply two lists of numbers together, sum the results. Everything else — attention, embeddings, RAG, fine-tuning, cosine similarity, RLHF, temperature, hallucination — is that operation dressed up in language designed to make you feel like you need an expert. You do not. Here is the mask pulled off each one.
The operation:
After the lead, the article walks through 15 common AI buzzwords (from embeddings and semantic similarity to attention, transformers, temperature, hallucination, RAG, fine-tuning, LoRA, vector databases, RLHF, emergent abilities, grounding, reasoning, and AGI), arguing that each one is ultimately built on dot products (often combined with operations like softmax, normalization, matrix stacking, sampling, and copy-paste) and that much of the jargon is storytelling rather than fundamentally new mathematics—concluding that what dot products can’t yet do is the core gap behind true AGI.
Read the full blog for free on Medium.
Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.
Published via Towards AI
Towards AI Academy
We Build Enterprise-Grade AI. We'll Teach You to Master It Too.
15 engineers. 100,000+ students. Towards AI Academy teaches what actually survives production.
Start free — no commitment:
→ 6-Day Agentic AI Engineering Email Guide — one practical lesson per day
→ Agents Architecture Cheatsheet — 3 years of architecture decisions in 6 pages
Our courses:
→ AI Engineering Certification — 90+ lessons from project selection to deployed product. The most comprehensive practical LLM course out there.
→ Agent Engineering Course — Hands on with production agent architectures, memory, routing, and eval frameworks — built from real enterprise engagements.
→ AI for Work — Understand, evaluate, and apply AI for complex work tasks.
Note: Article content contains the views of the contributing authors and not Towards AI.
Related posts
Recent Posts
