System prompt
Hidden instructions an app gives the AI before your message, setting its role and rules.
For example
A school's tutor bot may have a system prompt saying "guide students, don't give final answers".
Related terms
- Reasoning model A model that works through a problem step by step before answering: slower, but better at maths, logic and planning.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The AI first looks up trusted documents, then answers using what it found.
- Semantic search Searching by meaning instead of exact words.
- Temperature A setting that controls how random or creative a model's answers are.
- Token A small piece of text, a word or part of a word, that a language model reads and writes.
- Vector A list of numbers, like (14, 16). Also an arrow with a length and direction.