What Is the AWS AI Practitioner? Glossary & Key Terms

Foundation Model (FM)
A large-scale model pretrained on broad data that serves as a base for many downstream tasks via prompting or fine-tuning.
Large Language Model (LLM)
A foundation model specialized in understanding and generating natural language text, trained on massive text datasets.
Generative AI (GenAI)
AI systems capable of creating new content such as text, images, audio, or code based on learned patterns from training data.
Prompt Engineering
The practice of designing and refining input prompts to elicit better or more accurate outputs from a generative AI model.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
A technique that supplements a model's prompt with relevant retrieved external data at inference time to improve accuracy and grounding.
Fine-Tuning
Additional training of a pretrained model on a smaller, task-specific dataset to specialize its behavior.
Embedding
A numerical vector representation of text, images, or other data that captures semantic meaning, used for similarity search and RAG.
Vector Database
A database optimized for storing and querying embeddings by similarity, commonly used to power RAG retrieval steps.
Token
A unit of text, such as a word or subword piece, that a language model processes as input or output.
Context Window
The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) a model can consider at once when generating a response.
Hallucination
An AI-generated output that is factually incorrect or fabricated but presented as though it were accurate.
Amazon Bedrock
A managed AWS service offering access to multiple foundation models via a unified API, along with tools for customization and building generative AI applications.
Amazon SageMaker
A fully managed AWS platform for building, training, tuning, and deploying machine learning models.
Amazon Q
AWS's generative AI-powered assistant that helps users with tasks like answering questions, generating content, and assisting with code.
Amazon Titan
AWS's family of first-party foundation models available through Amazon Bedrock, covering text and embedding use cases.
Responsible AI
An approach to developing and deploying AI systems that emphasizes fairness, transparency, safety, privacy, and accountability.
Model Bias
Systematic skew in a model's outputs that unfairly favors or disadvantages certain groups, often stemming from unrepresentative training data.
Explainability
The extent to which a model's decisions or predictions can be understood and interpreted by humans.
Guardrails
Configurable policies applied to generative AI applications to filter, block, or redact undesired prompts or responses, such as harmful content or PII.
Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor
A SageMaker capability that tracks deployed models in production for data quality issues and drift.
Inference
The process of using a trained model to generate predictions or outputs from new input data.
Prompt
The input text or instructions provided to a generative AI model to elicit a response.
Shared Responsibility Model
The AWS security framework in which AWS secures the cloud infrastructure and managed services while customers are responsible for securing their own data, configurations, and usage.