Guide to A.I.-Driven Tech Jargon of 2025

In a Dec. 30, 2025 Tech Fix column, Brian X. Chen offered a cheat sheet decoding A.I.-driven tech lingo that has proliferated this year, from RAG to superintelligence. Chen explains several frequently used terms: “A.I. factories” are essentially data centers that need large storage and power; U.G.C.

stands for user-generated content; and A.G.I. means artificial general intelligence, a long-sought system with humanlike cognition, while “artificial intelligence” more generally describes technology that mimics the brain. The column also notes that Merriam-Webster chose “slop” as its word of the year to refer to A.I.-generated junk online.

Other entries include superintelligence, a predicted phase beyond A.G.I. that Mark Zuckerberg has discussed (Chen notes a public demo of computerized glasses in which Meta’s A.I. was stumped on how to make a steak sauce); RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, which links chatbots to external sources to improve accuracy; multimodal systems that handle images, text and audio; and hardware terms such as NPU and TPU.

Chen also covers cultural slang and features: “vibecoding” for chatbots that generate code, the term “agentic” for assistants that act on users’ behalf, and “Magic” as used for tools like Google’s Magic Cue, which Chen says perform actions by accessing large amounts of personal data.

Key Topics

Tech, Artificial Intelligence, Rag, Multimodal Systems, Npu, Vibecoding