Glossary
Plain English
Every field builds a private language; ours insists on translating it. These are the terms our articles link to — starter set now, the full glossary arrives with the migration.
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AIAI terms
- AI agent
- An AI system that does not just answer questions but takes actions — browsing, writing files, calling other software — usually in a loop of planning, acting and checking its own results.
- Large language model (LLM)
- The technology behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT: a model trained on enormous amounts of text that predicts what comes next, which turns out to be enough to draft, summarise, translate and reason.
- Prompt injection
- An attack where malicious instructions are hidden in content an AI reads — a web page, an email — so the AI follows the attacker’s orders instead of its user’s. The AI equivalent of tricking a new employee with a forged memo.
CryptoCrypto terms
- Blockchain
- A shared ledger kept by thousands of computers at once, where entries can be added but not quietly rewritten. That tamper-resistance is what lets strangers transact without trusting a middleman.
- DeFi (decentralised finance)
- Financial services — lending, trading, saving — rebuilt as software on a blockchain, with code (smart contracts) doing the job banks and brokers normally do.
- Smart contract
- A program on a blockchain that executes automatically when its conditions are met: "if X happens, pay Y". Powerful, but a bug in the code can be a bug in the money.
- Stablecoin
- A cryptocurrency designed to hold a fixed value, usually one US dollar, backed by reserves or algorithms. The bridge most money uses to move on and off blockchains.
- Gas fee
- The fee paid to the network to process a blockchain transaction. It rises when the network is busy — our Gas Fee Checker shows it live across seven networks.
- Zero-knowledge proof
- A way to prove a statement is true without revealing why — proving you are over 18 without showing your birthday. Used in crypto for privacy and for compressing huge amounts of computation.
QuantumQuantum terms
- Qubit
- The quantum version of a computer bit. Where a bit is 0 or 1, a qubit can be a blend of both at once — the property that gives quantum computers their (still mostly theoretical) power.
- Quantum error correction
- Techniques for keeping fragile qubits reliable by spreading information across many of them. Widely seen as the gate between today’s noisy prototypes and genuinely useful quantum computers.
- Post-quantum cryptography
- New encryption designed to survive attack by future quantum computers. The migration has already started, because data stolen today could be decrypted by the machines of the 2030s.