---
title: "Terminology"
description: "Glossary of AI and Honcho Specific Terms"
icon: "book"
---

## AI Development Basics

Essential terms for developers new to building AI applications.

**LLM (Large Language Model)**  The AI model that generates text responses,
like GPT-4, Claude, or Llama. Think of it as the "brain" that powers your
chatbot or AI assistant.

**Prompt**  The text you send to an AI model to get a response. This includes
user messages, system instructions, and any context you provide.

**Token**  How AI models count and limit text. Roughly 1 token = 0.75 words.
Models have token limits (like 4,000 or 128,000 tokens) that determine how much
text they can process at once.

**Context Window**  The maximum amount of text an AI model can "remember" in
one conversation. Once you exceed this limit, the model starts "forgetting"
earlier parts of the conversation.

**Embedding**  Converting text into numerical vectors that computers can
understand and compare. Enables "smart search" that finds similar content based
on meaning, not just keywords.

**Semantic Search**  Search based on meaning rather than exact keyword
matching, often using embeddings.

**Agent**  An AI system that can take actions and make decisions, not just
generate text responses. Agents can use tools, call APIs, and interact with
external systems.

## Honcho Terms

**Global Representation**  Derived context of a specific peer, synthesizing
insights from interactions across all sessions, including arbitrary data
ingested by this specific peer. With arbitrary data, a global representation
can be made independent of sessions.

**Local Representation**  One peer's persistent context of another based on
observed interactions/messages.

## Cognitive Science Terms

Cognitive science terms that are used throughout the inspiration and
implementation of Honcho

**Theory of Mind**  The ability of a computer to understand, remember, and
interact with its own mind, enabling it to form representations of the world
and make decisions based on its own knowledge and behavior.

**Social Cognition** The mental processes by which we perceive, interpret, and
respond to information about others and social situations. It includes the
encoding, storage, retrieval, and application of social knowledge.

**Cognitive Architecture** In CogSci, frameworks describing fixed structures & mechanisms underlying
human cognition. Such frameworks aim to explain how various components of the mind--perception, memory,
reasoning, learning, etc--combine to produce intelligent behavior across diverse environments. In
AI, it’s a computational implementation of these theories--a designed framework to replicate human
cognitive functions.

**Predictive Coding** A theory in CogSci proposing the brain is an active prediction machine,
continually generating & updating internal world models to anticipate sensory input, rather than
passively receiving it--closely linked to Bayesian brain hypotheses, which hold that the brain
interprets the world probabilistically, weighing prior knowledge against new evidence to minimize
uncertainty.