The world, explained from the ground up
The basics behind the news. Every unfamiliar word gets its own page: what it is, why it exists and why it matters to you. No jargon, no prior knowledge.
The Basics
This is where the walk up ends. Read just these and the rest starts to make sense.Who makes artificial intelligence
The same names show up in every story here: OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google. Here's the map: who builds artificial intelligence,...
What is an AI agent
The word "agent" gets stuck on every other new AI product this year. It doesn't mean a smarter chatbot. It means software that you...
What is an AI model and how it learns
An AI (artificial intelligence) model doesn't run on built-in rules - it's trained to guess the next word based on millions of tex...
Who pays for the power
Every answer artificial intelligence gives you passes through a real building, full of machines that seriously eat power. Behind t...
Who protects you
Every time you read "the company patched a critical vulnerability," it sounds like an admission of failure. The opposite is true. ...
What is a server
The computer that never sleeps - and without which nothing on the internet exists
What is code
The computer doesn't think. It reads a recipe and follows it literally, even when the recipe is wrong.
Who profits from artificial intelligence
Behind every model there is a bill. Someone puts up the money, someone takes a cut of every payment, and someone's music, photo or...
The Concepts
The words that come up in every story.The Chip Everyone Buys
Every piece of writing about artificial intelligence arrives at the same narrow point: the chip that does the math. Not the ordina...
Open Model and Closed Model
Some companies give you artificial intelligence only through their own door, for money every time. Others hand out the whole machi...
GPT
GPT is OpenAI's family of models, the engine behind ChatGPT. The number next to the letters isn't magic, it's a generation, like a...
What is the cloud
"The cloud" sounds like something natural, hanging over our heads. It's actually someone else's computer, in someone else's buildi...
Opus, Sonnet, Haiku
Opus, Sonnet and Haiku aren't three separate AI assistants. They're one and the same Anthropic model, made in three sizes - like o...
TPU and Trainium
Google and Amazon are building their own AI chips so they don't have to depend on NVIDIA forever. They've invested billions, but f...
Zero-day
A hole the vendor itself doesn't even know about yet - which is exactly why it's the most dangerous kind. Zero days means no one h...
CVSS
CVSS gives every hole in software a number from 0 to 10 - but the ten is for the potential, not for whether anyone is attacking yo...
CVE
The number every discovered hole in software gets, so the whole world can talk about the same thing - from the researcher who find...
KEV catalog
A list of holes in software that, beyond doubt, have already hit someone. Not a forecast, but a proven fact from the US cybersecur...
File and folder
The two words that no sentence about internet security will make sense without.
Program and application
The program is the tool. The app is its handle. And software is the whole toolbox.
What is a database
The database doesn't lie. The AI model can.
Library and framework
No one builds an app from scratch. Understand what programmers buy ready-made - and why a hole in a single piece hits thousands of...
Operating system, Linux, Ubuntu
Who decides who gets in where in your computer - and why a hole in the heart of this system is the most dangerous thing that can h...
Software license
The rules for using someone else's thing - written by the one who made it.
What is a browser
The browser is the window through which you look at the whole internet - and through which it sometimes looks back at you.
Sandbox, container, virtual machine
Three different names for the same idea - close off the thing you don't fully trust, before you give it access to the real things.
The terminal (the black window)
The black window with white text, through which you talk straight to the computer, with no mouse in between.
The European AI Act
The first major law in the world that tells artificial intelligence what it's not allowed to do. It applies to anyone selling AI i...
Bedrock, Vertex, Foundry
The three storefronts through which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft resell other companies' AI models like Claude. We explain what t...
Languages and formats
Code commands. Format just keeps what we already know.
Plugin (add-on)
The accessory bought from a different manufacturer - and the most hole-riddled part of your site.
Token and context window
Every word AI reads gets broken into small pieces - and you pay for each piece. Here's why the machine sometimes 'forgets' what yo...
Training and use
Building the model is a one-time job. Every question you ask it afterward is a new electricity bill - and that one never stops.
MCP (the common plug)
The common plug through which the AI assistant connects to your mail, your calendar, your files, instead of every connection being...
Multimodal model
A model that reads not just words but also photos, sound, video - as if it has more than one sense.
Benchmark
A number in the headline doesn't prove intelligence. It only proves memory.
Open source
The code is public. But not everything called "open" is actually open.
The hidden command (prompt injection)
The hidden command for agents doesn't come from a hacked machine. It comes from text the agent reads trustingly and takes for your...
How the system knows it's you
Authentication is the moment a system asks you "are you really you" and demands proof. Here's exactly what happens then.
Bypassing the check
An attacker rarely cracks a password. They just find the door nobody realized was a door at all.
DDoS (flooding)
A crowd blocking a shop's entrance. It steals nothing - it just doesn't let anyone else in.
Ransomware
The thief who changes the lock on your home while you're out. Then leaves you a note on the door.
Patch (update)
Once a patch ships, the hole isn't secret anymore. It's an announcement.
Stablecoin
A voucher that's supposed to always be worth one euro. The question is who actually holds the money behind it.
RAG (search, then answer)
Before it answers, a good AI checks your documents first. It doesn't rely on memory alone.
Weights and parameters
What actually sits inside an AI model - and why nobody can point a finger at where one piece of knowledge lives.
Prompt
You write the AI what you want from it. How you write it decides what you get back.
Europe's cyber and AI rules
Five acronyms, one logic behind them: Europe checks the product before it reaches you - it doesn't judge it afterward.
The Chinese camp: how the ban gave birth to free AI
DeepSeek and Alibaba don't have access to Nvidia's strongest chips. They switched to Chinese chips and gave their models away for ...
Cache
A site loads sharply faster the second time for one simple reason. It's also why "clear the cache" fixes half the technical proble...
Memory bugs
Behind most "critical vulnerability discovered" headlines sits the same old trick - as old as software itself.
Frontier model
A label with no official definition - which is exactly why every lab slaps it on itself.
The Chinese models (GLM, Qwen, Seedance, Kling)
Z.ai, Alibaba, ByteDance and Kuaishou are giving away free and open exactly what the West keeps locked up. A parallel world is gro...
LLM (large language model)
The abbreviation you'll keep running into - in every piece of writing about artificial intelligence.
The pass, the seal, and the second check
OAuth, OIDC, MFA - how you actually get in somewhere.
OpenAI's models: GPT-5.6, Sol, Terra, Luna and Codex
OpenAI split one model into three price tiers - and put its coding agent to work inside them.
Anthropic's models (Fable, Mythos, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku)
Claude isn't one brain, it's a family with a hierarchy - and in the middle of it stand two models that, for a short while, the US ...
The chips by name: Blackwell, MI350X, Jetson, Xeon, Jalapeño
Everyone's got a chip with a big name and everyone claims theirs is the future. Here's who actually does what - and why buyers no ...
The words for chips (HBM, FLOPs, FP4, gigawatt)
The units of measure that decide everything about a chip
Attacks by name (path traversal, symlink, social engineering)
Three attacks where nobody breaks anything - they just walk through a door someone left unlocked.
Neocloud and hyperscaler
The giants sell everything at once - and that's why they fall behind. The smaller players sell one single thing, clean access to a...
VPN, air-gap, and how a network is guarded
The tunnel, the moat, and the bridge - three ways to guard what shouldn't be reached from outside.
Agentic commerce: when the store sells to your AI, not to you
Stripe and OpenAI built a shared pipe that lets ChatGPT pay instead of you. Shopify built its own version with Google. The storefr...
VLA: from pixels to motion
The robot no longer repeats the same motion thousands of times. It looks, reads your words, and decides on its own how to grab the...
OCR: reading text off a photo
Paper kept its secrets long enough. Now AI makes it talk.
DNS and DNSSEC (the internet's directory and the seal on it)
Every time you type a name into the browser, someone has to tell you exactly which computer to knock on. That simple service is th...
WAF (web application firewall)
A WAF is a filter in front of the site - it watches incoming requests and stops the harmful ones before they reach the application...
Digital euro (CBDC)
The digital euro is an official electronic currency issued by the European Central Bank - euros in a phone app. Behind it stands a...
AI in science (AlphaFold, GenCast, Co-Scientist, MatterGen)
Four projects where AI stops imitating - and starts solving.
Humanoid robots (Atlas, Figure 03, Digit, Unitree G1)
Circus tricks that were on stage until recently - now judged by a real shift, not a demo clip.
Fair use: the training lawsuits
American judges are still deciding whether AI models read other people's books, or copy them - and a whole industry hangs on the a...
Watermarks (SynthID, Content Seal)
An invisible stamp in the photo, sound or text - proof it was made by AI. Assuming the AI-maker even bothered to sign it.
Latency and throughput
How long you wait versus how many get through overall - two different numbers companies trade off behind your back.
AGI
The three letters the industry measures its dreams with - and why nobody can say when it's “officially yes”.
Hallucination
Why the machine sometimes makes things up - confidently, smoothly, without blinking - and how to catch it.
Deepfake
When your eyes are no longer a witness: video and voice manufactured by a machine, of a person who never made them.
Mixture-of-Experts
How the biggest models can afford to be big: by never working all at once.
Fine-tuning and distillation
How one big model becomes many small and personal ones - without anyone starting from zero.
Reinforcement Learning
The model doesn't learn from a ready answer, it learns from attempts and a score. That's exactly why it sometimes finds a path nob...
The model that runs on your machine
The difference between a model that lives in someone else's cloud and one you download once and run on your own machine. Worth kno...
Quantization: how a model shrinks to fit
How a model made of a pile of numbers shrinks to fit a smaller machine and run faster, and what exactly you lose when you do it. W...
Why chips talk to each other more than they compute
A big model isn't trained on one chip, but on thousands, constantly talking to each other, and that network between them weighs as...
How agents pay
For thirty years the web kept a payment code nobody used. x402 finally put it to work: the server asks for money, the agent pays o...
The Digital Services Act (DSA)
The European law Brussels uses to fine platforms, and under which it has now named ChatGPT a very large search engine. The bigger ...
GDPR: the rules for your personal data
The regulation that makes every website ask you about cookies is a lot more than an annoying pop-up. It decides who may collect yo...
Alignment: getting the model to want what you want
A smart model that wants something else is more dangerous than a dumb one. Alignment is the work of getting a model to behave the ...
Reasoning models and the chain of thought
The model that thinks first and answers after. Its thinking shows up as text, so researchers read it like a diary. The question is...
Recursive self-improvement
AI that helps build the next AI, which helps build the one after that. In three weeks of September 2026, OpenAI and Alibaba both s...
Danger thresholds and the safety case
How a lab decides its model has become too dangerous for an ordinary release. The answer sits in documents with names like the Pre...
Supply-chain attack
They don't break your door. They break the door of whoever sells you the lock. That's why one poisoned package can reach thousands...
The Millennium Prize Problems
Seven math problems announced in Paris in 2000, a million dollars each. In a quarter of a century only one has been solved. Now Op...
Synthetic data
Data that wasn't collected from life but made on purpose to teach the model. It solves two problems at once: there isn't enough re...
World models: the machine that imagines what comes next
A language model predicts the next word. A world model predicts the next moment: where the cup will fall, how the robot's arm will...
Tokenised assets
A bond, a fund share or a deposit, recorded as a digital token in a shared ledger. The Eurosystem has been testing it since 2024, ...
Subsea cables: the internet lies on the seabed
The cloud isn't in the sky. By Meta's figures, about 99% of the data between continents runs through cables on the ocean floor.
Embedding: when meaning gets an address
An embedding turns a word, a photo or a sound into a row of numbers - something like an address on a map of meaning. Things close ...
Who's who
The names: the companies and institutions you will keep running into.API
API is the word behind every headline like "the company opened its model to developers." It describes how two programs talk to eac...
ChatGPT
A help desk open around the clock - you type a question, you get a ready answer. A product of OpenAI that, since late 2022, made t...
Claude Code
A program from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, where you tell the AI what you want from your code in plain language and it o...
Docker
Docker is the box software travels in unchanged, from the programmer's computer to the server, with no surprises and no "it worked...
Gemini
The AI model Google answers ChatGPT and Claude with - except instead of a separate app, it simply disappears into your phone, your...
Cloudflare
The company whose computers every fifth click on the internet passes through - the security at the door that most people have neve...
GitHub Copilot
AI that finishes your code while you type, like a prompter next to the programmer. Made by GitHub, owned by Microsoft, with the mo...
Anthropic
Anthropic is the company behind Claude, the tool we're writing this text with. It was founded by people who left another artificia...
NVIDIA
NVIDIA is the company whose name hides behind every artificial intelligence story, even when it isn't mentioned in it. It doesn't ...
CISA
CISA is the US agency that keeps an official list of software holes with proof that someone is already using them to attack people...
OpenAI
OpenAI is the company that put artificial intelligence in everyone's pocket through ChatGPT, the program where you type a message ...
Ollama
A free program that runs an AI model on your own computer - no internet, no stranger's server reading what you type.
Vercel
The service that puts websites online without servers or technicians. Now it's adding an AI technician who touches the live stage.
GitHub
The place where the world's code lives - and the history of every change to it.
Llama
The open model from Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. You download it once and it's yours forever, no subscription,...
Mistral
The French company that decided Europe shouldn't stay just a customer of foreign artificial intelligence. The only serious local p...
WordPress
A free program that lets you build a website without knowing code. Almost four out of every ten sites in the world run on it - whi...
Google DeepMind
The lab in London that Google bought and turned into its core for artificial intelligence. This is where Gemini is born - the mode...
xAI and Grok
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, merged with SpaceX, and the chatbot Grok that comes with it. Behind them stands a gia...
Perplexity
An AI search engine that doesn't throw ten links at you to pick from. It gives you a ready answer and shows where it got it from -...
Adobe Firefly
Adobe's image generator, which sells not better art but clean provenance - trained only on photos the company actually owns the ri...
Runway
A company that makes AI that generates video from text. You write what you want to see and the program creates it frame by frame -...
Hugging Face
The warehouse through which almost the entire open AI world passes - people upload and download models there, without asking anyon...
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft's cloud, where OpenAI lives and runs. The company that supplies the computers under ChatGPT also owns a stake in OpenAI.
Adobe
The company whose programs are behind almost every image, video and logo you've ever seen. Today it feels the ground shifting unde...
Spotify
The biggest music streaming platform decided to count not just streams, but which of them was even made by a human. This is where ...
Suno
AI that turns a text description into a finished song - melody, arrangement, vocals, all at once. That's why the music industry is...
Figma
The program where the design of almost every website and app is born today - in the browser, live, with everyone on the same canva...
ElevenLabs
AI that speaks with a real human voice - reads, clones, dubs. And that's exactly why a voice is no longer proof on its own.
Cursor
Cursor is a code editor with built-in artificial intelligence - since 14 August 2026 officially part of SpaceX, Elon Musk's compan...
AMD and Intel
The other two chipmakers who've claimed for years they're catching up with NVIDIA in AI. So far the market share says otherwise.
AWS (Amazon)
The biggest digital warehouse in the world - a huge part of the internet runs on it. And at the same time it's an investor in Anth...
Stripe
The company through which a huge part of the internet accepts card payments - invisible, but without it most online stores stop wo...
Figure and Unitree
American versus Chinese in the race for the humanoid robot - one sells expensive confidence, the other cheap access. We're trackin...
Boston Dynamics
The company whose robots do backflips and dance in the viral videos. Today it's fully owned by Hyundai, the South Korean car maker...
Slack
The office chat that replaced email is now also where AI agents read what's actually happening inside a company.
NASA and ESA
One is a US government agency, the other - a union of 22 European countries. Both make it into the AI newsroom for one simple reas...
LeRobot
An open-source software package from Hugging Face that turns the robotic arm from a research project into something you download a...
Shopify
A platform where you pay monthly rent and get a ready-made online store, without building anything yourself. Over 5 million mercha...
Apple
The walled garden that always kept everything behind its own walls opened a gate - and let a foreign brain move in.
Notion, Asana and the work tools
The two apps where every company keeps what it knows and who has to do what are now letting AI read everything inside - and do the...
Meta
The company that lives off your attention.
LangChain and the agent frameworks
The scaffolding half the industry builds AI agents on made the US cybersecurity list with a hole that has no lock.
Palantir
The company named after the magic stone that sees everything - and slowly drives mad whoever looks into it.
Microsoft
The old empire that bought the future.
VS Code and the code editors
The tool where all the world's software gets written suddenly turned into a battlefield. Not over design. Over who finishes the pr...
The benchmarks by name (Terminal-Bench, GDPval, Arena, Elo)
Three tests, three completely different ideas of what a 'good' AI model means - and one shared weakness nobody likes to talk about...
The AI companies you'll hear about (Together, Replit, Isomorphic, Perplexity)
AI's second tier doesn't make headlines - it makes the markets, while nobody's watching.
The company that knows everything about you - search, phone, mail and video in one pair of hands, plus its own AI, built into ever...
ByteDance
The company that built the most accurate attention algorithm in the world - and now makes the video to feed it too.
Terraform and infrastructure as code
One text file spins up whole server farms by itself. The problem is what happens when the file lies.
The software that's always full of holes
Joomla, SharePoint, ColdFusion, curl - four different things with one thing in common: old, everywhere, forgotten.
Oracle, Broadcom, SoftBank
Three names you never see on screen - but you pay all three while you type into ChatGPT.
NVD and who counts the holes
One system holds the registry of known holes in software. The other walks the internet every night - checking which of them are al...
Nature, arXiv, and how science gets published
Peer-reviewed versus published instantly - the difference that decides whether you believe the headline.
Circle, USDC, and crypto's banks
The company behind the most traded dollar look-alike in the crypto world now has its own bank. The money behind it is kept by Blac...
Why car factories are buying robots
Hyundai bought an entire robotics company. BMW put a robot on the assembly line. GXO already pays one by the shift in a warehouse....
Venture capital (who gives the money)
Benchmark, Y Combinator, General Catalyst and SoftBank don't bet on companies. They bet on statistics - nine failures for one jack...
Five probes, one creed: show the mistake, don't hide it
Roman, New Horizons, Hayabusa2, DART and Hera look like nothing else in the AI industry - they publish the raw data, failures incl...
Haute couture (Chanel, Dior, couture)
The craft that survives without apologizing.
The European Commission and the AI Office
Who writes the rules for AI in Europe
The media we cite
Reuters confirms with a phone call, Bloomberg with money, TechCrunch with speed. None of them is the original source. That's alway...
How America regulates AI: the FTC waits, the states lag
In America, artificial intelligence ships first and explains later - if it even gets caught.
The groups and the networks (Storm-2949, NetNut, residential proxies)
One department cons the employee. Another rents out the TV in your living room. Neither one touches code.
Who represents music (RIAA, IFPI, the big three)
Three companies, two trade bodies and one union decide what you hear, and whether artificial intelligence gets to sing at all.
The Riemann hypothesis
A 167-year-old riddle about where the zeros of one function stand. The prize is a million dollars. The real prize is bigger: the k...
Formal verification (Lean)
A proof that asks for no trust. A machine checks every step, and either everything holds or nothing passes.
Botnet
An army of other people's devices - routers, cameras, computers - assembled without their owners' knowledge. This is the crowd tha...
Sovereign AI
Knowing whose ground your thinking is computed on. Not patriotism but an address: whose laws apply to your data while a machine pr...
Teleoperation
The machine does the work, a human steers it from a distance. Between a robot that decides and a robot that executes, the differen...
Code signing
The wax seal of software. It proves the program comes from who it claims to, and that nobody touched it on the way.
Multiagent systems
When it is not one AI agent doing the work but several at once. Sometimes they complement each other, sometimes they get in each o...
Reproducibility
Whether another person can repeat someone else's result with the same data and get the same thing. If not, the claim stays just a ...
ECH (the hidden site name)
Even over HTTPS, the name of the site you open travels in the open. ECH hides it.
Zero Trust
The rule that the internal network is not safe by itself. Every request is checked as if it came from outside.
AI factory
A building with machines, power and cooling whose output is compute. It gets financed like a power plant, not like software.
Age verification
How a site decides how old you are. To catch the child, it usually has to look at everyone.
JetBrains
The company behind the editors millions of programmers work in, and behind the agent Junie. A short entry on who's behind the tool...
MLPerf: the shared speed test for AI hardware
Every chipmaker says theirs is the fastest. MLPerf is where they have to show it under the same rules, in front of their competito...