Digital Twin
A working model of something real — a building, a supply chain — kept in step with it using live data, so changes can be tested before they are made for real.
Related terms
Multimodal
An AI that handles more than one kind of input — text and images together, say, or audio and video. It is why you can now photograph a menu and ask an assistant what is in a dish.
Synthetic Content
Text, images or video produced by AI. Not penalised for being synthetic, but it is judged by the same standard as anything else — and thin AI-written pages fail that standard easily.
Inference
The moment an AI actually answers, as opposed to when it was trained. Training happens once and costs a fortune; inference happens every time somebody asks, and is what you pay for per use.
Entity
A distinct thing a search engine can recognise: a company, a person, a place, a product. Being understood as an entity, rather than as a string of characters, is what lets you be recommended by name.
Content Provenance
A record of where a piece of content came from and how it was made, sometimes attached to the file itself. Emerging as a way to tell an original photograph from a generated one.
llms.txt
An emerging convention: a plain-text file at your site root that gives AI systems a clean map of what is on it. It saves an assistant from crawling around to work out what your site contains.