Much of the AI in business before 2022 was predictive: a model looked at an input and gave back a label or a number, such as fraud or not fraud, or a demand forecast. Generative AI produces something new instead: a paragraph, an image, a song, a block of code. Large language models generate text; image, audio and video models generate media; and multimodal models handle several of these at once.
Generative AI and agentic AI are related but not the same. A generative model produces content when asked. An agent uses a generative model to plan and take actions toward a goal, calling tools and checking results along the way. Agentic vs. non-agentic AI covers the difference.
See AI vocabulary in plain English for this term alongside the other language of models, data, agents, and infrastructure.
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