Reference Library
Glossary of Intelligence
Plain-language, sourced definitions for the 50 core terms behind brains, minds, and machines. Each term opens a dedicated page with a topical visual, deeper explanation, and further reading.
Showing 50 of 50 terms
Artificial Intelligence
Agentic AI
AI systems that pursue goals through multi-step planning, tool use, memory, and environmental interaction.
AI Safety
AI Alignment
The technical problem of ensuring AI systems pursue goals and values consistent with human intent.
Neuroscience
Amygdala
Almond-shaped subcortical structure central to emotional learning, threat detection, and memory modulation.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
AI systems capable of matching or exceeding human cognitive performance across the full breadth of intellectual tasks.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)
Hypothetical AI that vastly exceeds the best human minds in essentially every domain of interest.
Neuroscience
Basal Ganglia
Subcortical nuclei coordinating action selection, habit learning, and reward-driven behavior.
Cognition
Bayesian Brain
The hypothesis that the brain represents uncertainty and updates beliefs in approximately Bayesian fashion.
Neurotechnology
Brain–Computer Interface (BCI)
A direct communication channel between neural activity and an external device.
AI Safety
Capability Control
Family of AI-safety techniques that constrain what a system can do, rather than what it wants.
Neuroscience
Cerebellum
Densely packed hindbrain structure essential for motor coordination, timing, and predictive learning.
Neuroscience
Cerebral Cortex
Outer layer of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functions.
Neuroscience
Connectome
The complete map of neural connections in a brain or nervous system.
Philosophy of Mind
Consciousness
The state of being aware of and able to report on one's own experiences, thoughts, and surroundings.
Neuroscience
Default Mode Network
Large-scale brain network active during rest, self-referential thought, and mental simulation.
Neuroscience
Dopamine
A neurotransmitter central to motivation, reward learning, and motor control.
Artificial Intelligence
Embeddings
Dense vector representations that map words, tokens, or items into a continuous geometric space.
Cognition
Embodiment
The thesis that cognition is shaped by the body's sensors, actuators, and physical interaction with the world.
Artificial Intelligence
Emergent Abilities
Capabilities that appear abruptly in large models but are absent in smaller ones.
Artificial Intelligence
Fine-Tuning
Adapting a pre-trained model to a specific task or style by continuing training on a smaller targeted dataset.
Neuroscience
Hippocampus
A seahorse-shaped structure crucial for forming new episodic memories and spatial navigation.
Neuroscience
Hypothalamus
Small subcortical region that regulates homeostasis, hormones, and the autonomic nervous system.
Artificial Intelligence
Inference
The process of running a trained model on new inputs to produce predictions or generations.
AGI
Instrumental Convergence
Tendency for sufficiently capable agents with diverse final goals to pursue similar intermediate sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition.
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Model (LLM)
A neural network trained on massive text corpora to predict and generate human-like language.
Neuroscience
Long-Term Potentiation
Persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent activity - the cellular basis of learning and memory.
AI Safety
Mechanistic Interpretability
Research that reverse-engineers the internal computations of neural networks into human-understandable concepts.
Artificial Intelligence
Mixture of Experts
Architecture where a router sends each token to a small subset of expert sub-networks, scaling capacity without proportional compute.
Neuroscience
Myelin
A fatty insulating sheath around axons that dramatically speeds neural signal conduction.
Neuroscience
Neurogenesis
The generation of new neurons from neural stem cells, occurring throughout life in select brain regions.
Neuroscience
Neuron
Electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information via electrochemical signals.
Neuroscience
Neuroplasticity
The molecular and structural changes that let neural circuits adapt with experience.
Neuroscience
Neurotransmitter
Chemical messenger released at synapses to relay, amplify, or modulate signals between neurons.
AGI
Orthogonality Thesis
Claim that an agent's intelligence and its final goals can vary independently - any level of intelligence can pursue any goal.
Neuroscience
Plasticity
The brain's capacity to reorganize itself by forming new connections throughout life.
Cognition
Predictive Coding
A theory that the brain continuously generates predictions about sensory input and learns from prediction errors.
Neuroscience
Prefrontal Cortex
Front-most cortical region implementing planning, working memory, inhibition, and executive control.
Philosophy of Mind
Qualia
The subjective, experiential qualities of conscious states - what something is like to experience.
Artificial Intelligence
Reasoning Models
LLMs trained or prompted to perform extended chain-of-thought before answering, trading inference compute for accuracy.
AGI
Recursive Self-Improvement
Scenario in which an AI system iteratively improves its own design, producing rapid capability gains.
Artificial Intelligence
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Architecture that grounds LLM outputs by retrieving relevant documents before generation.
AI Safety
RLHF
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - fine-tuning models against learned preferences from human raters.
AI Safety
Superalignment
Research agenda focused on aligning AI systems substantially more capable than their human supervisors.
Neuroscience
Synapse
Junction between two neurons where signals are passed chemically or electrically.
Artificial Intelligence
Synthetic Data
Model-generated data used to train or augment AI systems when real data is scarce, sensitive, or biased.
Neuroscience
Thalamus
Central relay nucleus that gates and routes nearly all sensory and cortical signals.
Artificial Intelligence
Transformer
A neural-network architecture built on self-attention; the foundation of modern LLMs.
AI Safety
Value Alignment
The technical and philosophical problem of ensuring AI systems pursue goals consistent with human values.
Artificial Intelligence
Vector Database
Database optimized for storing and querying high-dimensional vectors via approximate nearest-neighbor search.
Cognition
Working Memory
Short-term system for holding and manipulating information used in reasoning and decision-making.
Artificial Intelligence
World Models
Neural networks that learn internal simulations of an environment to predict future states and plan actions.