What is function calling? Function calling — also called tool calling or tool use — is the mechanism that lets a large language model (LLM) request that external software run on its behalf. Instead of generating a final answer from its training data alone, the model outputs a structured message — typically a function name…

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining the instructions, context, and examples given to a large language model to produce accurate, relevant, and useful outputs—bridging human intent and model behavior through structured communication.

What is the Transformer Architecture? The Transformer architecture is the engine room behind the current wave of artificial intelligence. Introduced in the seminal paper ‘Attention Is All You Need’ by Vaswani et al., this design fundamentally changed how machines process language. Before this, models relied on sequential processing, which was slow and struggled to remember…

Understanding Embeddings and Vector Databases In the world of modern AI, computers need a way to understand the ‘meaning’ behind human language, images, and audio. Embeddings are the bridge between raw data and machine understanding. They are numerical vector representations—essentially long lists of numbers—produced by machine learning models. In this mathematical space, items that share…

Think of training data like the textbooks and practice problems a student works through before an exam. The student doesn’t memorize every answer—they learn underlying patterns, relationships, and problem-solving strategies that they can apply to new questions they’ve never seen before. Training data plays the same role for an AI model: it provides the examples…

Context window The context window (also referred to as context length, context size, or context limit) is the maximum amount of information—measured in tokens—that a large language model can process in a single request. Think of it as the model’s “working memory” for a specific conversation or task. Everything you provide as input, plus everything…

AI guardrails are safety mechanisms that filter inputs, monitor outputs, and enforce behavioral boundaries. Learn how rule-based filters, Constitutional AI, and runtime monitoring keep AI systems safe.

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is an oversight pattern where humans review, approve, or intervene in AI decisions. Learn how HITL works, when it is required, and its tradeoffs.

Fine-tuning adapts a pre-trained language model for specific tasks using methods like SFT, LoRA, and RLHF. Learn when to fine-tune, costs, risks, and the 2026 recommended workflow.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an architecture pattern that enhances a large language model’s responses by first retrieving relevant information from external knowledge sources—such as documents, databases, or APIs—and then feeding that retrieved context into the model alongside the user’s query. Rather than relying solely on what the model memorized during pre-training, RAG lets it look…