As a tech journalist for the last 20 years, I’ve had a front-row seat to the slow death of the English language, driven by the engineers and marketers of Silicon Valley who use clunky abbreviations, awkward jargon and meaningless superlatives to describe the latest innovations.
Let’s chat about U.G.C.! Did you know Google’s assistant can now have a two-way conversation? This new smartphone is shockingly, if not stunningly, faster than the last one.
Lately, the relentless verbiage seems to have gotten worse, with more superfluous adjectives, buzzwords, acronyms and abbreviations — like superintelligence, RAG and TPU — added to the list at an alarming pace.
The obvious culprit is the artificial intelligence boom that has upended the tech industry, birthing a fresh glossary of lingo. Tellingly, the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster chose “slop” as its word of the year, referring to the A.I.-generated junk that polluted our social media feeds.
For consumers, the buzzwords make what is happening with our personal technology extra confusing. Here’s a cheat sheet for decoding some of the most parroted tech jargon of 2025, along with terms that have endured over the years.
A.I. Factory
Tech companies like Nvidia and Dell have named their newest data centers “A.I. factories.” Companies say they are special data centers that need vast amounts of storage and power to make A.I. technology work. But historically, tech giants have always made improvements to giant computing facilities to support new technologies, so A.I. factories are, simply put, data centers.
U.G.C.
No, it’s not a shoe brand. It stands for user-generated content, and the abbreviation has been popular lately among Google employees working on A.I. search technology. In plain speak, they are referring to social media posts, such as a TikToker talking about his favorite burger restaurant.
A.G.I.
For years, companies including OpenAI, Google and Amazon have said their goal is to achieve A.G.I., meaning artificial general intelligence, a technology with humanlike cognition. But for decades, plain old “artificial intelligence” has referred to technology mimicking the human brain. The elusive nature of A.G.I. raises confusion about whether other tech products labeled “A.I.” are artificially intelligent at all.
Superintelligence
Even though it’s unclear when, if ever, the tech industry will achieve A.G.I., Mark Zuckerberg of Meta is already talking about the next phase. When A.I. technology gets so powerful that it can give us data about everything we see and hear in real time, humanity will achieve superintelligence, he predicts. (In September, when Mr. Zuckerberg publicly demonstrated a pair of computerized glasses that could one day deliver superintelligence, Meta’s A.I. got stumped when asked how to make a steak sauce.)
RAG
This acronym stands for retrieval-augmented generation, a technique to improve the accuracy of chatbots. It involves connecting a chatbot with external sources of information, such as an encyclopedia, a history book or a news article. It’s an off-putting acronym, but think of it as a rag that can clean up occasionally messy answers spewed by chatbots.
Multimodal
This tongue twister of a word describes technology that can answer your questions about images, text and audio files that you share with a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini. You will hear this word more often in the coming years when companies release smart glasses that include cameras and microphones, enabling an A.I. assistant to give you information about what you see and hear.
NPU
Most consumers probably wouldn’t care whether or not a computer shipped with a neural processing unit, a chip that speeds up A.I. apps that generate text and images. Nonetheless, Microsoft, Dell and Lenovo are highlighting NPU chips to market their newest laptops. The chips are simply faster and more energy-efficient, as new computer chips tend to be.
Related: TPU, or tensor processing unit, a term that Google uses to describe the neural processors it relies on in data centers to make A.I. software work.
Vibecoding
Chatbots like Claude and Gemini can automatically generate lines of code, making it possible for inexperienced programmers to write simple programs by typing a prompt like, “I want to create an app to choose an outfit from my closet.” Enthusiasts have called the ritual “vibecoding,” and the results have been hit or miss.
Agentic
When a chatbot does something for you, like book a flight, techies call this “agentic,” referring to the way chatbots can act as agents, similar to the people who book your travel. The clunky word has gained traction in the last few years, but “virtual assistant,” the term used to describe older tools that tried to help you (e.g., Siri and Alexa), was less cringe.
Magic
When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone in 2007, he said the touch screen “works like magic,” referring to how it worked very well. This year, Google awkwardly used the word for a new A.I. tool it released for smartphones, Magic Cue. That piece of software does things for you automatically — such as look up your flight itinerary when a friend asks you what time you are landing.
But Magic Cue and similar A.I. technologies that do things for you automatically work when you share large amounts of personal data, like your contact list, location, messages and email. There’s nothing magical about that at all.
Cade Metz contributed reporting from San Francisco.
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.
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