Beginner
What is an AI Model?
The plain-English version: what a model is, how it is trained, and why there are so many of them.
A model is a very large pattern-matcher
An AI model is a program that has learned patterns from enormous amounts of data. Instead of being told rules by a programmer, it is shown examples (text, images, code) and adjusts billions of internal numbers, called parameters, until it can predict what usually comes next.
When you type a question, the model does not look up an answer. It predicts, one small piece at a time, the most plausible continuation of your text based on everything it saw during training.
Why are there so many?
Providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, DeepSeek and Mistral each train their own families. Within a family you will see sizes (mini, flash, pro, opus) that trade capability for speed and price, and versions that improve over time.
Our Models page lists hundreds of them with live pricing so you can see the trade-offs side by side.
What a model is not
It is not a database of facts and it does not browse the web unless a tool has been attached. It can be confidently wrong. Treat it as a very well-read assistant whose work you still check.
