Sovereign AI glossary

    The key terms behind sovereign AI, defined in plain English.

    Air-gapped AI
    An AI model running on infrastructure with no connection to external networks, so the most sensitive data can be processed without any possibility of it leaving. Read more
    CLOUD Act
    A US law allowing American authorities to compel US-based providers to disclose data they control, even when that data is stored outside the US, including in the UK. Read more
    Continual learning
    An approach where a model keeps learning from new data over time without forgetting what it already knew, so it compounds in value rather than going stale.
    Data residency
    Keeping data, and the inference that processes it, within a defined geographic or legal jurisdiction. Residency is about location; sovereignty is about control. Read more
    Domain-specific LLM (DSLM)
    A large language model post-trained on a particular organisation's or industry's data so it reasons like an expert in that field, often beating larger general models on its tasks. Read more
    Fine-tuning
    A light adaptation of an existing model to a narrow task or style. Quicker than deeper specialisation but shallower, and prone to catastrophic forgetting. Read more
    Forget-Me-Not™
    Locai Labs' post-training framework that adds deep domain expertise to a base model while preserving its general capabilities, mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
    Frontier model
    A large, general-purpose model at the leading edge of capability, typically offered through a rented API rather than as a model you own.
    Inference
    The process of running a trained model to produce an output for a given input (a prompt). With sovereign AI, inference happens inside your perimeter.
    Mixture of Experts (MoE)
    A model architecture that routes each input to a subset of specialised sub-networks ("experts"), giving large capacity while activating only part of the model per query.
    Model weights
    The learned parameters that define a model's behaviour, the actual asset. Owning the weights means owning the model, rather than renting access via an API key. Read more
    On-premise (on-prem) AI
    Running AI models inside your own data centre or hardware, rather than calling a model over the internet, so data stays in and cost is fixed. Read more
    Post-training
    Deeply specialising a strong base model on your domain, language, and workflows while preserving its general reasoning, the approach Locai uses to build owned models. Read more
    Private AI
    AI that runs inside your perimeter with no external data sharing or telemetry, so prompts, documents, and outputs never leave your environment. Read more
    Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
    A technique that fetches relevant documents at query time and feeds them to a model. Complementary to post-training, but it doesn't change how the model itself reasons.
    Sovereign AI
    Enterprise AI you fully own and control, the weights, the infrastructure, the data path, and the update cadence, deployed inside your own perimeter rather than rented through an API. Read more
    Sovereignty washing
    Marketing a service as "sovereign" because it runs in a local data centre, while control still sits with a foreign provider, superficial sovereignty without real control. Read more

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