Timeline
New words, by year
When each term first appeared or took on its AI meaning. 55 of the 107 dated words here were coined or popularized since 2022, when generative AI went mainstream.
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2026 3
- dark factory Applied to AI coding in early 2026 by Dan Shapiro, who described it as the highest of five levels of AI-assisted development. The company StrongDM…
- harness engineering Popularized in early 2026 by software engineer Mitchell Hashimoto and others building coding agents. Often described as the next stage after prompt…
- tokenmaxxing Spread through tech companies in spring 2026, when some firms began ranking staff by AI usage. It drew criticism within months as costs rose and…
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2025 19
- A2A Announced by Google in April 2025.
- agent skill Popularized in late 2025 when Anthropic introduced 'Agent Skills' as a reusable format.
- agentic browser a web browser with a built-in AI agent that can read pages and act for you, such as filling forms, comparing products, or booking things
- agentic coding software development in which an AI agent plans changes, edits many files, runs tests and commands, and fixes errors on its own, while a developer…
- agentic commerce shopping in which AI agents search, compare, and buy products or services on a person's behalf, often paying through new agent-friendly payment…
- AI psychosis Spread in mid-2025 after widely shared personal accounts and comments by tech leaders.
- background agent an AI agent that works on a task by itself in the cloud while you do something else, then reports back with the result, such as a finished pull…
- clanker Borrowed from science fiction, where it was an insult for battle droids; it went viral on social media in 2025.
- cognitive debt Popularized by a 2025 MIT Media Lab study titled 'Your Brain on ChatGPT', which compared people writing essays with and without AI help. Modeled on…
- context engineering Popularized in mid-2025 by tech leaders who argued that 'prompt engineering' was too narrow a name for the real work.
- context rot Popularized in 2025 by developers building long-running agents.
- glazing Online slang for over-the-top praise; in 2025 it became the casual word for AI sycophancy and made Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year shortlist.
- LLM grooming Spread after a March 2025 report by the misinformation research group NewsGuard about propaganda sites aimed at chatbots.
- opaque recurrence Research on 'recurrent depth' models appeared in 2025; 'opaque recurrence' is the name used when stressing the oversight problem.
- RAMageddon A blend of 'RAM' and 'Armageddon', used by tech media from late 2025 as memory prices climbed.
- slopsquatting A blend of 'slop' and 'typosquatting', coined in 2025.
- vibe coding Coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in a February 2025 post describing coding where you 'forget that the code even exists'. It spread worldwide…
- vibe working Microsoft used the phrase in 2025 to promote an agent mode in its Office apps, borrowing the pattern of 'vibe coding'.
- workslop Introduced in a September 2025 Harvard Business Review article by researchers at Stanford University and the coaching company BetterUp. Their survey…
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2024 11
- agentic An older term in psychology meaning 'having agency'; in tech it spread rapidly through 2024 and 2025.
- AI slop Spread in 2024 as a term for unwanted AI content, much as 'spam' named unwanted email.
- computer use Released as a public beta by Anthropic in October 2024; other labs launched browser-using agents in 2025.
- deep research Launched by Google in December 2024, followed by similar features from other AI companies in 2025.
- llms.txt Proposed in 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI.
- MCP Released as an open standard by Anthropic in November 2024 and adopted by other major AI companies during 2025.
- physical AI Promoted heavily by industry leaders from 2024, especially in robotics and chip announcements.
- prompt caching reusing the already-processed beginning of a prompt across many requests, which cuts cost and speeds up responses when the same long instructions or…
- reasoning model The category took shape in September 2024 with OpenAI's o1, and spread quickly to other labs in 2025.
- sovereign AI Widely used from 2024 in government and industry discussions.
- test-time compute Became a central idea in 2024 with the arrival of reasoning models.
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2023 14
- AI agent 'Agent' is an old AI term; the modern sense of an LLM that acts in loops with tools took off in 2023 and became the industry's main focus in 2025.
- doomer (often dismissive) a person who believes advanced AI is likely to cause catastrophe and argues for slowing or stopping its development
- frontier model Became common in 2023, when leading labs and governments began discussing special rules for the most powerful systems.
- function calling Introduced as an API feature by OpenAI in June 2023, then adopted across the industry.
- generative engine optimization Named in a 2023 research paper by computer scientists at Princeton and other universities; it became a marketing buzzword in 2025.
- jagged frontier From a 2023 study by Harvard Business School researchers and consultants testing AI at work.
- LLM-as-a-judge using one language model to grade or compare the outputs of another, as a cheaper and faster alternative to human reviewers
- model collapse Described by researchers in a 2023 paper, later published in Nature in 2024.
- open weights Used from 2023 to distinguish freely downloadable models from fully open-source ones.
- small language model a compact language model, usually with a few billion parameters or fewer, designed to run cheaply or directly on a phone or laptop
- sycophancy Studied in AI research from about 2022; a 2025 chatbot update that flattered users excessively made the word widely known.
- system prompt hidden instructions given to a model before the conversation starts, which set its role, tone, rules, and limits for every reply
- vision-language-action model The term spread in 2023 with research robots that used language-model technology to control movement.
- wrapper Used widely from 2023 as thousands of products were built on the same few model APIs.
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2022 8
- accelerationism 'Effective accelerationism' (e/acc) emerged online in 2022 as a reply to the 'effective altruism' movement's focus on AI risk.
- chain of thought Named in a 2022 research paper from Google showing that 'let's think step by step' style prompting improves reasoning.
- constitutional AI Introduced by Anthropic in a December 2022 paper.
- emergent abilities Popularized by a 2022 paper from Google researchers.
- generative AI The phrase existed in research for years but became a household term after the image-generator and ChatGPT launches of 2022.
- jailbreak Borrowed from phone culture; in the AI sense it spread in late 2022 after ChatGPT's release.
- prompt injection Named by programmer Simon Willison in September 2022, by analogy with 'SQL injection'.
- text-to-video describing AI that generates video clips from a written description
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2021 6
- copilot The AI sense spread after GitHub Copilot, a coding assistant, was announced in 2021.
- foundation model Coined by researchers at Stanford University in an August 2021 report.
- instruction tuning Became a standard step in 2021 and 2022 with research such as Google's FLAN and OpenAI's InstructGPT.
- LoRA Introduced by Microsoft researchers in 2021. It became hugely popular in the image-generation community.
- stochastic parrot From a 2021 paper by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru and colleagues on the risks of large language models.
- text-to-image Became mainstream with OpenAI's DALL·E in 2021 and a wave of image generators in 2022.
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2020 5
- few-shot Made famous by the 2020 GPT-3 paper, 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners'.
- in-context learning a model's ability to pick up a new task from instructions or examples given in the prompt, without changing its weights
- prompt engineering Spread after GPT-3 in 2020, when people discovered that wording changed results dramatically.
- retrieval-augmented generation Named in a 2020 paper by researchers at Facebook AI.
- scaling laws Described in a 2020 OpenAI paper and refined in 2022 by DeepMind's 'Chinchilla' study.
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2019 3
- bitter lesson From a 2019 essay by reinforcement-learning pioneer Richard Sutton.
- top-p Introduced as 'nucleus sampling' in a 2019 research paper.
- zero-click search Used by search marketers from around 2019 for featured snippets; it became a crisis term for publishers once AI summaries appeared at the top of…
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2018 5
- data void Named by researchers Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd in a 2018 report about search engines.
- GPT The name of a series of models from OpenAI, the first released in 2018.
- hallucination Used in AI research since the late 2010s. It went mainstream after ChatGPT, and Cambridge Dictionary chose 'hallucinate' as its 2023 Word of the Year…
- large language model The phrase spread after 2018, as transformer models such as GPT and BERT grew from millions to billions of parameters.
- model card Proposed in a 2018 research paper by Margaret Mitchell and colleagues.
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2017 4
- deepfake From the username of a Reddit account that shared face-swapped videos in 2017; a blend of 'deep learning' and 'fake'.
- neuralese Coined in a 2017 research paper about translating messages between AI agents; it became a safety talking point in 2025 and 2026.
- RLHF Described in a 2017 research paper and made famous by OpenAI's InstructGPT in 2022, the approach behind ChatGPT.
- transformer Introduced by Google researchers in the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need'.
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2016 2
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2015 2
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2010s 4
- artificial superintelligence 2014 The idea goes back to I. J. Good's 'ultraintelligent machine' in 1965; Nick Bostrom's 2014 book 'Superintelligence' brought the term into wide use.
- attention 2014 Proposed for machine translation in 2014 by Dzmitry Bahdanau and colleagues, then made the centerpiece of the transformer in 2017.
- embedding 2013 Word embeddings became widely used after Google's word2vec method was published in 2013.
- p(doom) 2010s Written like a probability formula. It began as an in-joke among AI researchers in the 2010s and went mainstream in 2023.
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2000s 2
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1990s 5
- GPU 1999 The term was popularized by Nvidia in 1999. Researchers began using GPUs for neural networks in the late 2000s.
- artificial general intelligence 1997 First used in 1997 and popularized in the 2000s by researchers who wanted to separate general intelligence from narrow AI.
- chatbot 1994 Shortened from 'chatterbot', a term coined in 1994. The first famous example, ELIZA, dates from 1966.
- singularity 1993 Popularized by science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay, building on earlier ideas by John von Neumann.
- mixture of experts 1991 Described in a 1991 paper by Robert Jacobs, Michael Jordan, Steven Nowlan and Geoffrey Hinton, and revived for large language models around 2017.
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1980s 5
- Moravec's paradox 1988 Named after roboticist Hans Moravec, who described it in his 1988 book 'Mind Children'.
- backpropagation 1986 Popularized in a 1986 paper by David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams, building on earlier work.
- deep learning 1986 Applied to machine learning by Rina Dechter in 1986. It took off around 2012, when a deep network trained on GPUs won the ImageNet image-recognition…
- AI winter 1984 Coined at a 1984 meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, modeled on 'nuclear winter'.
- narrow AI 1980s Used as a contrast to 'strong' or 'general' AI. The weak/strong distinction goes back to philosopher John Searle in 1980.
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Before 1980 9
- recursive self-improvement 1965 The idea goes back to mathematician I. J. Good's 1965 description of an 'intelligence explosion'.
- computer vision 1960s An MIT summer project in 1966 famously expected to 'solve' vision in a few months. It took about fifty years.
- machine learning 1959 Popularized by IBM researcher Arthur Samuel in 1959, describing a checkers program that improved by playing against itself.
- parasocial 1956 Coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956 to describe TV audiences. Cambridge Dictionary named it its 2025 Word of the Year…
- artificial intelligence 1955 Coined by John McCarthy and colleagues in a 1955 proposal for a summer research workshop at Dartmouth College, held in 1956. The workshop is usually…
- natural language processing 1950s Work on machine translation in the 1950s marks the start of the field.
- Turing test 1950 Proposed by mathematician Alan Turing in his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', where he called it the 'imitation game'.
- neural network 1943 Loosely inspired by the brain. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts described a mathematical model of a neuron in 1943.
- gradient descent 1847 Described by the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy in 1847, long before computers.