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What is AI anyway?

We strip away the marketing and walk through what 'AI' actually means in 2025 — models, data, training, and the boring stuff that matters.

Tyler Durden 14 Jul 2024 5 min read

“AI” is a marketing label wrapped around a stack of much more specific things: models, data, training procedures, and the infrastructure that lets all of it run cheaply enough to matter.

When someone says “we added AI”, what they usually mean is one of:

  • We are calling a hosted language model from a vendor.
  • We trained or fine-tuned a model on our own data.
  • We bolted a retrieval system onto a pre-trained model.

The differences matter — for cost, for privacy, and for what actually ships.