Glossary
The glossary supports the learning experience by giving learners an easy way to decode unfamiliar language.
The context window is the working space available to a model in one exchange. When it fills up, important instructions or reference material may fall out of view.
Context limits affect what the model can remember, compare, and respond to in one pass.
Grounding means giving the model the material it should rely on, instead of asking it to guess from general training patterns alone.
Better grounding reduces irrelevant guesses and improves task-specific reliability.
A hallucination is not a rare bug. It is a predictable outcome when a model lacks the right context, tries to satisfy a prompt too aggressively, or fills gaps with plausible-looking text. Hallucinations are especially risky because they often sound specific, helpful, and complete. Good AI use does not depend on never seeing them. It depends on grounding, verification depth, confidence labels, and escalation before unsupported details become trusted work.
Hallucinations are a routine failure mode, so review and verification must be designed in.