Glossary
Private AI terms in plain language
Short definitions, with a link to where each term matters in your office.
- Air-gapped
- A system with no network connection to the outside world. Learn more
- Audit log
- A record of who did what in the system, and when. Learn more
- BAA
- Business associate agreement: a contract HIPAA requires with certain vendors. Learn more
- Cloud AI
- An AI service run by a vendor on the vendor's systems, shared across customers. Learn more
- De-identified documents
- Documents with names and other identifying details removed. Learn more
- Fine-tuning
- Further training of a model on selected examples. It is a separate step and is not how your documents are searched. Learn more
- GPU
- A graphics processor. It does most of the calculation for an AI model. Learn more
- Hallucination
- A confident answer from AI that is false, such as a citation to a case that does not exist. A professional must review every output. Learn more
- Hosted (dedicated)
- Run on a server reserved for one client in an outside facility. Learn more
- Inference
- The moment a trained model produces an answer. This is the work your server does each time someone asks a question. Learn more
- Matter separation
- Limits that keep one case's documents apart from another's. Learn more
- MFA
- Multi-factor authentication: a password plus a second check, such as a phone code. Learn more
- On-premise
- Installed at your own office, on hardware you control. Learn more
- Open model
- An AI model whose weights are published under a license, so it can run on your own hardware. Learn more
- PHI
- Protected health information: health data covered by HIPAA. Learn more
- Pilot
- A 30-day paid test of one use case on your documents, credited to setup if you continue. Learn more
- Private LLM
- A large language model that runs on hardware reserved for one organization, instead of a shared public service. Learn more
- RAG
- Retrieval-augmented generation: the system first finds relevant passages in your documents, then answers from them. Learn more
- Role-based access
- Permissions set by a person's role, so staff see only what their job requires. Learn more
- Rule 5.3
- The professional-conduct rule on supervising nonlawyer assistants, which covers outside vendors. Learn more
- SSO
- Single sign-on: one login for your work tools. Learn more
- Telemetry
- Usage data that software sends back to its maker. Learn more
- VPN
- An encrypted private connection between your office and a server. Learn more
- VRAM
- The memory on a GPU. It limits how large a model the server can run. Learn more