AI Glossary

Compute

The processing power used to train and run AI models, often counted in hours on chips such as GPUs. Research on language models has found that their test loss falls predictably, as a power law, as the compute spent training them grows.

See also

  • GPU

    A chip first built to draw graphics, whose ability to do many calculations at once made it widely used for training and running AI models.

  • Inference

    Running a trained model to produce an output, as opposed to training it.

  • Pretraining

    The first stage of training, in which a model learns general patterns from a large, broad dataset before it is adapted to particular tasks.

  • Test-time compute

    Computation a model spends while answering rather than during training, for example reasoning at length, sampling several answers or searching among them.

Source: Kaplan et al., Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020) (opens in a new tab)

Cite this term.

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This term

Orbyt Labs, Compute (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/compute

The dataset (JSON)

Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset

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