Lexicon
Butcher’s Glossary
A field guide for the post-silicon researcher. Every term of art in modern machine learning has, it turns out, an older and more honest equivalent in the butcher shop.
AI term
Butcher term
Definition
Tokenizer
→ Butcher
Cleaves continuous input into discrete, sellable cuts.
Context window
→ Walk-in fridge
Finite cold storage for everything currently in scope.
Fine-tuning
→ Dry-aging
Long, controlled exposure that develops flavor and reduces water weight.
Hallucination
→ Freezer burn
Confidently produced, technically still meat, but nobody wants it.
RAG
→ Mise en place
Retrieving the right ingredient at the right moment, pre-portioned.
Embedding
→ Marinade
Soaks the input in latent flavor before cooking.
Attention head
→ Cleaver
Decides where the next cut lands.
Prompt engineering
→ Seasoning
Minor adjustments with disproportionate effect on outcome.
Quantization
→ Trimming the fat
Removes precision and weight; the cut still cooks, mostly.
Distillation
→ Rendering
Slowly extracts essence from a larger, fattier original.
Benchmark
→ Health inspection
Brief, public, and gameable.
Inference cost
→ Cost per pound
What the customer sees at the counter.
Agentic loop
→ Sausage stuffing
Repeatedly forcing output back through the casing until it holds.
Chain of thought
→ Recipe
Step-by-step instructions; cannot be skipped without consequence.
AGI
→ The whole hog
Theoretically possible. Has not yet been served.