Here are the words that keep turning up in our Tesla, SpaceX and AI stories, explained in plain English.

Tesla

Autopilot
Tesla's standard driver-assistance feature. It keeps the car in its lane and at a set distance from the car ahead. The driver stays in charge the whole time.
Full Self-Driving (Supervised), or FSD
Tesla's paid driver-assistance software. It can steer, brake, change lanes and follow a route on highways and city streets. "Supervised" means the driver has to watch the road and be ready to take over.
Robotaxi
Tesla's ride-hailing service, where riders book a Tesla that drives itself. It started in Austin, Texas, in June 2025.
Cybercab
Tesla's purpose-built two-seat robotaxi, with no steering wheel or pedals. Tesla showed it in October 2024.
Cybertruck
Tesla's stainless-steel electric pickup. Deliveries began in November 2023.
Tesla Semi
Tesla's electric heavy truck, built for freight.
Optimus
Tesla's humanoid robot, still in development.
Megapack
A shipping-container-sized battery that Tesla sells to power companies and big sites to store energy for the grid.
Powerwall
Tesla's home battery. It stores solar power or cheap off-peak power for later.
Supercharger
Tesla's own network of fast chargers. Many sites are now open to other brands of EV too.
NACS
The North American Charging Standard. It's Tesla's plug design, now standardised as SAE J3400 and used by many carmakers in North America. Teslas sold in Australia use the CCS2 plug.
4680 cell
A large cylindrical battery cell that Tesla designed, 46 mm wide and 80 mm tall. That's where the name comes from.
Gigafactory
Tesla's name for its biggest factories, such as Giga Texas and Giga Shanghai.
Over-the-air (OTA) update
New software that arrives over the car's internet connection, the way a phone updates.

SpaceX

Falcon 9
SpaceX's workhorse rocket. Its first stage flies back and lands so it can be flown again.
Falcon Heavy
Three Falcon 9 first stages strapped together, for the heaviest payloads.
Merlin
The engine that powers Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
Dragon
SpaceX's capsule. Crew Dragon carries astronauts, and Cargo Dragon carries supplies to the International Space Station.
Starship
SpaceX's giant rocket, designed to be fully reused. The name covers the whole stack as well as the upper stage, which is also called Starship. It's the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown.
Super Heavy
Starship's first stage, the booster.
Raptor
The methane-fuelled engine that powers both Starship and Super Heavy.
Chopsticks, or Mechazilla
The pair of arms on Starship's launch tower that catch a returning Super Heavy booster in mid-air. The first catch was in October 2024.
Starbase
SpaceX's Starship site at Boca Chica in south Texas. It became an official city in May 2025.
Starlink
SpaceX's satellite internet service, made up of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.
Droneship
An uncrewed barge at sea where Falcon boosters land when they can't fly back to shore.
Static fire
A test where a rocket fires its engines while held down on the pad.
Max Q
The moment in a launch when the air puts the most stress on the rocket.
Low Earth orbit (LEO)
Orbits up to about 2,000 km high, where Starlink and the space station fly.
Propellant transfer
Moving fuel from one spacecraft to another in orbit. Starship needs it for long trips, including landing NASA astronauts on the Moon.
HLS
Human Landing System. It's the Moon-landing version of Starship that NASA picked for its Artemis program.
RUD
"Rapid unscheduled disassembly." It's SpaceX's dry way of saying a vehicle blew up.

AI

Model
The trained software at the heart of an AI tool. Ask it something and it answers based on patterns it learned.
Large language model (LLM)
A model trained on huge amounts of text to read and write language. Chatbots are built on them.
Training
Teaching a model by showing it vast amounts of data. It's the expensive part.
Inference
Using a trained model to get an answer. It's what happens every time you ask a chatbot something.
Parameters
The internal numbers a model learns during training. More parameters often means a more capable model, but a slower and costlier one.
Tokens
The small chunks of text a model reads and writes, often parts of words. Prices and limits are usually counted in tokens.
Context window
How much text a model can take in at once, counted in tokens.
Prompt
What you type to the model, meaning the question or instruction.
Reasoning model
A model that works through a problem step by step before answering. It's usually slower and better at maths and code.
Multimodal
A model that handles more than text, such as images, audio or video.
Open weights
A model whose trained parameters are published, so anyone can download it and run it on their own computer.
Agent
An AI system that doesn't just answer but takes steps for you, like searching, filling in forms or running code.
Hallucination
When a model states something false with confidence.
GPU
Graphics processing unit. The chips used to train and run most AI models.
xAI and Grok
xAI is Elon Musk's AI company. Grok is its chatbot and model family.
Colossus
xAI's AI supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee.
STD/1
The Gold Standard's own machine-readable story format. It's what our Agent desk serves to AI agents instead of a web page. The details are in llms.txt.