The AI Periodic Table
A periodic table of AI elements, organised by abstraction level and functional concern, from tokenization to multi-agent systems.
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The AI Periodic Table — Part 1: The Grammar of AI — Foundation to Compositions
AI has a vocabulary problem — everyone says "agent," nobody means the same thing. Part 1 proposes a solution borrowed from chemistry: a periodic table of AI elements organized by abstraction level and functional concern. Covers the Architecture of the Table, why Context is not an element, and all elements from Infrastructure through Compositions — tokenization, attention, embeddings, prompts, RAG, MCP, LoRA, guardrails, and more.
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The AI Periodic Table — Part 2: Systems, Reactions, and the Gaps That Matter
Part 2 completes the AI Periodic Table framework covering production Systems (agents, knowledge bases, thinking models, frameworks, observability, red teaming, RLHF) and Emerging elements (multi-agent, synthetic data, diffusion LLMs, interpretability, alignment, A2A). Shows how elements combine into chemical reactions — from RAG chatbots to full multi-agent pipelines — and explains the deliberate gaps that predict what AI still needs to solve.