AI & Tech, Minus the Jargon

The T in ChatGPT is a network design that Google researchers unveiled in 2017. Generative Pre-trained what?

• Terminal
• Transformer
• Tokeniser
• Translator

Answer: Transformer. The Transformer came from the paper "Attention Is All You Need" and now powers most language models.

Your manager asks you to paste "the URL" in the chat. What does URL stand for?

• Unified Routing Log
• Uniform Resource Locator
• Universal Recall Link
• User Response Line

Answer: Uniform Resource Locator. A Uniform Resource Locator tells the browser exactly where a page lives.

AI tools count your usage not in words but in small chunks of words. What are the chunks called?

• Tokens
• Packets
• Cookies
• Pixels

Answer: Tokens. Tokens are pieces of words. Usage limits and pricing for AI tools are counted in them.

An AI chatbot confidently cites a court case that never existed. What do AI researchers call an error like this?

• Overfitting
• Phishing
• Hallucination
• Latency

Answer: Hallucination. The answer sounds plausible but is invented. In 2023 two US lawyers were fined $5,000 for filing fake cases that ChatGPT had made up.

An SMS says your bank KYC expires today and asks you to click a link. What is phishing by text message called?

• Whaling
• Spoofing
• Smishing
• Vishing

Answer: Smishing. Smishing is SMS phishing. Vishing is by voice call, and whaling targets top bosses.

IT suggests you start using a password manager. What does it mainly do for you?

• Changes your password every day
• Shares your passwords with IT
• Removes the need for any password
• Stores a strong, unique password for each account

Answer: Stores a strong, unique password for each account. It remembers the passwords so you don't have to, which makes a different password for every site practical. Many also generate them and warn you about breaches.

A video shows your CEO announcing surprise bonuses, but AI built it from real clips of his face and voice. What is a fake like this called?

• Spoofing
• Meme
• Catfish
• Deepfake

Answer: Deepfake. Deepfakes use AI to make people appear to say or do things they never did. Check anything surprising through an official channel.

In 1997, the reigning world chess champion lost a full match to an IBM computer. What was it called?

• Deep Blue
• Watson
• Big Blue
• AlphaGo

Answer: Deep Blue. Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in their rematch. Watson came later, and AlphaGo belonged to Google DeepMind.

A teammate posted the team photo publicly, then deleted it an hour later. What is the safe assumption?

• It is gone for good
• Copies may already exist elsewhere
• Only the team can still see it
• The platform must restore it

Answer: Copies may already exist elsewhere. Anyone could have saved, screenshotted or shared it while it was up. Think before you post, not after.

A 2014 film about this British codebreaker took its title from his own name for a test of machine intelligence. What was the film?

• The Imitation Game
• The Mirror Test
• The Mind Game
• The Chinese Room

Answer: The Imitation Game. Alan Turing called it the imitation game; we now call it the Turing test. The Chinese Room is philosopher John Searle's idea.

Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini run on an LLM, trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word. What does LLM stand for?

• Large Language Model
• Linked Learning Machine
• Logical Language Module
• Layered Logic Model

Answer: Large Language Model. "Large" refers to the billions of settings, called parameters, that the model learns during training.

The name Wi-Fi was dreamed up by a branding agency in 1999. What do its letters actually stand for?

• Wireless Fidelity
• Wide Field
• Nothing, it is a brand name
• Wireless Finder

Answer: Nothing, it is a brand name. It was picked as a catchy play on hi-fi. A short-lived tagline added "wireless fidelity" later, which is where the myth comes from.

Bluetooth takes its name from a 10th-century ruler remembered for uniting warring tribes, the way the tech links devices. Who was he?

• A Swedish inventor
• An Ericsson engineer
• A Norse god
• A Danish king

Answer: A Danish king. Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson united Denmark. The logo combines his initials in Nordic runes.

Those "click every traffic light" puzzles before you log in are CAPTCHAs. What is their main job?

• Speeding up the page
• Telling humans apart from bots
• Checking your eyesight
• Saving your password

Answer: Telling humans apart from bots. CAPTCHA is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It was developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

Your files are "saved in the cloud". Where are they physically?

• In the sky, via satellites
• Only in your phone's memory
• On servers in remote data centres
• Inside your Wi-Fi router

Answer: On servers in remote data centres. The cloud is someone else's computers: big data centres run by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, often with copies in several places.