AI Vocab 101

I've been having a lot of conversations with non-tech people recently about AI. What I keep running into is the same pattern: smart, curious people who are genuinely trying to understand what's happening, but who don't have the vocabulary to name what they don't know. And when you can't name it, you can't ask the right question, which means you stay stuck at the surface. The car wash test is a perfect example of this. A few months ago, screenshots flooded social media of people asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok a deceptively simple question: the car wash is 40 meters from my house. Should I walk or drive? The chatbots said walk. What many people in the conversation didn't understand is that the people getting bad results weren't using a bad AI. They were using a lesser model, probably the free tier of a product, without knowing that's what they were doing. And without vocabulary, there's no way to even articulate that distinction. Here's likely what actually happened. "ChatGPT" isn't on