2025年讓我們困惑的10個科技術語（1/2）

Recently the New York Times reported the following:

10 Pieces of Tech Jargon That Confused Us in 2025 (1/2)

Here’s a cheat sheet for decoding this year’s A.I.-driven tech lingo, from RAG to superintelligence.

By Brian X. Chen - Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.

Dec. 30, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

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.)

(to be continued)

Translation

2025年讓我們困惑的10個科技術語（1/2）

以下是解讀今年人工智能驅動的科技術語的速查表，從RAG到超級智能，應有盡有。

身為一名從業20年的科技記者，我親眼目睹了英語的緩慢消亡，而這背後是矽谷的工程師和行銷人員，他們使用笨拙的縮寫、生硬的術語和毫無意義的 ’最高級別’一詞來描述最新的創作。

我們來講講 ‘用者生成內容’（UGC）吧！你知不知道谷歌的助理現在可以進行雙向對話了嗎？這款新智能型手機的速度快得驚人，令人嘆為觀止, 比上一代更快。

最近，冗長的術語似乎愈演愈烈，各種多餘的形容詞、流行語、首字母縮略詞和縮寫 - 比如“超級智能”、“RAG”和“TPU” - 以驚人的速度湧現。

罪魁禍首顯然是顛覆科技產業的人工智能熱潮，它催生了一套全新的行內語。值得注意的是，字典出版商韋氏字典將「slop」（垃圾）選為年度詞彙，指的是充斥我們社群媒體的人工智能產生的垃圾訊息。

對消費者而言，這些流行語讓我們對個人科技的發展更加困惑。以下是一份速查表，幫助你解讀2025年最常被提及的一些科技術語，以及一些多年來一直沿用的術語。

 A.I. Factory (人工智能工廠)

像英偉達和戴爾這樣的科技公司將他們最新的數據中心命名為「人工智能工廠」。這些公司聲稱，它們是特殊的資料中心，需要大量的儲存空間和電力來運行人工智能技術。但從歷史上看，科技巨頭們一直在改進其龐大的運算設施以支援新技術，因此，人工智能工廠說白了就是數據中心。

UGC (用者生成內容)

別誤會，這不是鞋類品牌。它代表用者生成內容（User-generated Content），這個縮寫最近在Google從事人工智能搜尋技術的員工中很流行。簡單來說，他們指的是社交媒體帖子，例如TikTok用戶分享他最喜歡的漢堡包店。

AGI (人工通用智能)

 多年來，包括OpenAI、Google和亞馬遜在內的公司一直表示，他們的目標是實現AGI，即一般的人工通用智能，一種具有類似人類認知能力的技術。但幾十年來，簡單通用的「人工智能」指的是模仿人腦的技術。人工通用智能（AGI）一詞的複雜性和神秘性，引發了人們對其他被貼上「人工智能」（AI）標籤的科技產品是否真的有人工智能而感困惑。

Superintelligence (超級智能)

儘管科技業何時（甚至是否）能夠實現人工普遍智能尚不明朗，但Meta公司的Mark Zuckerberg已經開始談論下一階段。他預測，當人工智能技術強大到能夠即時提供我們所見所聞的一切數據時，人類將達至超級智能。 （在9月，Zuckerberg公開展示了一副未來可能實現超級智能的智能眼鏡，但當被問及如何製作牛排醬時，Meta公司的人工智能卻答不出來。 ）

（待續）

Note:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks, at a level comparable to a human. This is different from most AI systems today, which are narrow AI (also called ANI – Artificial Narrow Intelligence). (ChatGPT)

Narrow AI (ANI) is designed for specific tasks, examples are: voice assistants, image recognition, recommendation systems. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can reason, learn, and adapt across many domains. It can solve new problems without task-specific training, it could understand context, common sense, and abstract ideas. (ChatGPT)