AI Encyclopedia·Term of the Day·Archive

Every previous term of the day

Nakoda does not yet run a hand-scheduled daily editorial calendar for this feature - the term shown on any given date is drawn deterministically from the encyclopedia catalog, so the same date always resolves to the same term and this archive can reconstruct any past day exactly. It reads the same way a scheduled one would.

1. Sun, 4 Oct 2026

   Transformer (Architecture)

   The neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, that processes a whole sequence at once using self-attention instead of reading it word by word - and that underlies almost every modern LLM.
2. Sat, 3 Oct 2026

   Large Language Model (LLM)

   A deep-learning model, usually built on the transformer architecture, trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token and, in doing so, learn grammar, facts, reasoning patterns and style.
3. Fri, 2 Oct 2026

   Responsible AI & AI Governance

   The organisational practice of overseeing AI systems for safety, fairness, accountability and regulatory alignment across their lifecycle - and the frameworks, like NIST's AI Risk Management Framework, organisations use to operationalise it.
4. Thu, 1 Oct 2026

   Diffusion Model

   A generative model that learns to create data - typically images - by learning to reverse a process that gradually adds noise to training data, starting from pure noise and denoising it step by step into a coherent output.
5. Wed, 30 Sept 2026

   Multimodal AI

   AI models that process and reason across more than one type of input or output - text, images, audio, video - within a single system, rather than bolting separate single-purpose models together.
6. Tue, 29 Sept 2026

   Foundation Model

   A model trained on broad data at scale, usually via self-supervision, that can be adapted - by fine-tuning, prompting or other means - to a wide range of downstream tasks, rather than built for one task alone.
7. Mon, 28 Sept 2026

   Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)

   A post-training method that adjusts a pre-trained model's behaviour using human preference judgments, rather than more raw text - the technique that turned raw language models into helpful assistants.
8. Sun, 27 Sept 2026

   Mixture of Experts (MoE)

   A model architecture that splits computation across many specialised sub-networks ('experts') and, for each input, routes it to only a few of them - giving a model the knowledge capacity of a huge network at the compute cost of a much smaller one.
9. Sat, 26 Sept 2026

   Context Window

   The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) a model can 'see' at once - the prior conversation, a document, an instruction - when generating its next output.
10. Fri, 25 Sept 2026

    Prompt Engineering

    The practice of designing the instructions and examples given to a language model to reliably get the output you want, without changing the model itself.
11. Thu, 24 Sept 2026

    Fine-Tuning

    Further training a pre-trained model on a smaller, labelled, task- or domain-specific dataset so it adapts its internal weights to that task - as opposed to prompting, which leaves the model unchanged.
12. Wed, 23 Sept 2026

    Embedding

    A numeric vector that represents the meaning of a piece of data - a word, sentence, image - such that similar meanings sit close together in vector space.
13. Tue, 22 Sept 2026

    Vector Database

    A database purpose-built to store embeddings (vectors) and answer 'find me the most similar items' queries fast, using approximate nearest-neighbour search - the storage layer under most RAG systems.
14. Mon, 21 Sept 2026

    Falcon (LLM family, TII)

    A family of open-weight large language models developed by Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII), released from 2023 onward, including one of the largest openly available LLMs at the time of its release.
15. Sun, 20 Sept 2026

    UAE National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031

    The UAE Government's national framework, announced in October 2017, setting out its goal to become a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2031 through AI adoption across government, healthcare, education, transport and energy.
16. Sat, 19 Sept 2026

    Model Context Protocol (MCP)

    An open standard, created by Anthropic and released in November 2024, for connecting AI applications to external data sources and tools through one common protocol instead of a custom integration for each pairing.
17. Fri, 18 Sept 2026

    AI Agent

    An AI system built from an LLM, a set of tools it can call, and enough autonomy to plan and take a sequence of actions toward a goal - as distinct from a system that only answers a single prompt.
18. Thu, 17 Sept 2026

    AI Hallucination

    When a language model generates false or fabricated information - a made-up citation, a wrong fact, a nonexistent feature - stated with the same fluent confidence as a correct answer.
19. Wed, 16 Sept 2026

    Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

    A technique that pairs a language model with a search step over an external knowledge source, so the model's answer is generated from retrieved, citable text rather than from memory alone.
20. Tue, 15 Sept 2026

    Transformer (Architecture)

    The neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, that processes a whole sequence at once using self-attention instead of reading it word by word - and that underlies almost every modern LLM.
21. Mon, 14 Sept 2026

    Large Language Model (LLM)

    A deep-learning model, usually built on the transformer architecture, trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token and, in doing so, learn grammar, facts, reasoning patterns and style.
22. Sun, 13 Sept 2026

    Responsible AI & AI Governance

    The organisational practice of overseeing AI systems for safety, fairness, accountability and regulatory alignment across their lifecycle - and the frameworks, like NIST's AI Risk Management Framework, organisations use to operationalise it.
23. Sat, 12 Sept 2026

    Diffusion Model

    A generative model that learns to create data - typically images - by learning to reverse a process that gradually adds noise to training data, starting from pure noise and denoising it step by step into a coherent output.
24. Fri, 11 Sept 2026

    Multimodal AI

    AI models that process and reason across more than one type of input or output - text, images, audio, video - within a single system, rather than bolting separate single-purpose models together.
25. Thu, 10 Sept 2026

    Foundation Model

    A model trained on broad data at scale, usually via self-supervision, that can be adapted - by fine-tuning, prompting or other means - to a wide range of downstream tasks, rather than built for one task alone.
26. Wed, 9 Sept 2026

    Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)

    A post-training method that adjusts a pre-trained model's behaviour using human preference judgments, rather than more raw text - the technique that turned raw language models into helpful assistants.
27. Tue, 8 Sept 2026

    Mixture of Experts (MoE)

    A model architecture that splits computation across many specialised sub-networks ('experts') and, for each input, routes it to only a few of them - giving a model the knowledge capacity of a huge network at the compute cost of a much smaller one.
28. Mon, 7 Sept 2026

    Context Window

    The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) a model can 'see' at once - the prior conversation, a document, an instruction - when generating its next output.
29. Sun, 6 Sept 2026

    Prompt Engineering

    The practice of designing the instructions and examples given to a language model to reliably get the output you want, without changing the model itself.
30. Sat, 5 Sept 2026

    Fine-Tuning

    Further training a pre-trained model on a smaller, labelled, task- or domain-specific dataset so it adapts its internal weights to that task - as opposed to prompting, which leaves the model unchanged.