Agentic AI Glossary

Inference

Running a trained model to produce an answer from the context it receives.

Illustrative conversation

  1. Did the model learn our coding standard after reading AGENTS.md once?
  2. It used the file during inference; its underlying parameters were not retrained by that request.

Definition

Inference is the act of using a trained model to make a prediction or generate a response from new input. During ordinary inference the model applies its learned parameters; it does not retrain them from the prompt. In an agent workflow, one inference request may return user-facing text, a structured tool call, or another intermediate decision.

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