Glossary
Terms of art, defined.
Definitions used consistently across the docs, the research papers, and the product pages. If a word is doing load-bearing work somewhere on the site, it's here.
A
- Active learningDiscovery
- The part of autonomous discovery that asks: given what we know, what experiment should we do next? Cost-aware in the Aether implementation — picks experiments by expected information gain per dollar.
- ADMETDiscovery
- Absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, toxicity — the five major endpoint classes for predicting how a drug behaves in the body.
- Agent runtimeRuntime
- The production substrate that turns long-horizon agents from notebooks into services. Long-running processes, deterministic memory, capability-gated tool use, eval-gated deploys.
- ALCOA+Safety
- Attributable, Legible, Contemporaneous, Original, Accurate — plus the four extra criteria. The standard for electronic records in regulated life-sciences environments.
- AetherModel
- The foundation model. Trained on simulation, instruments and design history. Three sizes: 7B dense, 40B dense, 280B sparse-MoE — plus specialised Bio 12B and Edge 1.3B checkpoints.
C
- Capability gateRuntimeSafety
- A policy check between the model and a real-world tool call. Refusal corpora, controlled-pathogen lookups and export-control rules live here.
- CFDEngineering
- Computational fluid dynamics. Forward-in-time simulation of fluid flow, heat transfer and related continuum phenomena. The most-represented domain in Aether pretraining.
- Chain-of-custodySafety
- Immutable hash-linked record of every reagent, plate, sample, dilution and pipette step. ALCOA+-grade audit by construction.
- Compute-optimalModel
- The data-to-parameter allocation that minimises test loss at a fixed training compute budget. ≈28 tokens/parameter for Aether vs ≈20 for text-trained baselines.
- Conservation regularisationModel
- Soft penalty during pretraining that punishes violations of mass and energy conservation across rolled-out trajectory segments. Source of the steeper simulation-vs-text scaling exponent.
- Cross-domain transferModel
- The empirical result that pretraining on CFD measurably improves downstream performance on cell-painting and ADMET. The shared latent appears to be governing dynamics.
D
- Data-quality cliffModel
- The token count beyond which additional curated pretraining data ceases to improve loss. Approximately 4×10²¹ tokens for Aether — earlier than the text-trained equivalent.
- DFTEngineeringDiscovery
- Density-functional theory. Quantum-mechanical method for predicting electronic structure and material properties. One of the five core simulation modalities.
- DisciplineCommercial
- A surface Aether ships through. We have five: engineering, semiconductors, drug discovery, autonomous labs, software. The same model underneath.
- DriftEngineering
- Cumulative error in a rolled-out trajectory relative to a reference solution. Aether holds within 4% drift on integrated quantities out to 4,000–5,200 time-steps.
E
- Episodic memoryRuntime
- Event-keyed memory store. Every tool call, every decision, every observation has a hash-linked record with provenance.
- Eval-gated deployRuntime
- Promotion of an agent version is gated by an evaluation suite that runs continuously. Threshold must hold for the configured window before promotion completes.
F
- FEAEngineering
- Finite-element analysis. Numerical method for structural mechanics, heat transfer, electromagnetics on meshed domains. The structural-FEA discipline in Aether for engineering.
- FEPDiscovery
- Free-energy perturbation. Alchemical method for predicting relative binding affinities of small molecules. Aether Bio achieves 1.06 kcal/mol RMSE on the public benchmark.
- Forward-deployed engineerCommercial
- An Apex engineer who pairs with the customer team for the duration of a pilot. Senior, technical, and on the hook for the win condition.
G
- GxPSafety
- Good Practice — quality-assurance regulations for life-sciences manufacturing, lab and clinical work (GMP, GLP, GCP). Aether for autonomous labs is GxP-ready.
L
- Long-rollout stabilityEngineeringModel
- How far a trajectory can be unrolled before drift in integrated quantities exceeds a threshold. Approximately orthogonal to single-step cross-entropy.
M
- MDDiscovery
- Molecular dynamics. Classical or quantum-classical simulation of atom-level motion. One of the five core simulation modalities; specialised checkpoint exists.
- MoEModel
- Mixture of experts — sparse-attention architecture that decouples parameter count from per-token compute. Aether 280B sparse-MoE has 40B active parameters per token.
O
- On-premCommercial
- Customer-controlled physical infrastructure. Aether supports on-prem deployment on customer hardware as a property of the Enterprise tier.
P
- PilotCommercial
- A paid head-to-head engagement scoped to one customer workload with a written win condition. Three to eight weeks; forward-deployed engineer included.
- ProvenanceRuntimeSafety
- The decision, tool call and policy that produced a given memory record. Every write has it; revocation is itself a versioned event.
R
- Red-teamSafety
- Adversarial evaluation against the model's refusal behaviour. We commission external passes quarterly and run internal red-teams continuously.
- Refusal corpusSafety
- Versioned set of test cases that define the model's refusal behaviour. Hash-versioned per release; customer extensions supported via zero-knowledge protocol.
- RTLSilicon
- Register-transfer level. Digital-hardware design abstraction. One of the five core simulation modalities; powers Aether for semiconductors.
S
- Scaling exponentModel
- The power-law exponent α in loss ∝ compute^(-α). Aether α = 0.087; text-trained baselines α ≈ 0.076 on matched architectures.
- Semantic memoryRuntime
- Concept-keyed memory store. Facts about the customer's campaign, chemistry, or design — stored as a graph with edges typed by their evidence.
- Sovereign deploymentSafetyCommercial
- Air-gapped, zero-outbound-traffic configuration for export-controlled and national-security work. Supported on the Enterprise tier; weights pinned per release.
- SSO / SCIMCommercial
- SAML / OIDC single sign-on and SCIM user provisioning. Standard enterprise identity primitives, supported on the Team and Enterprise tiers.
- Streaming trajectoryModelRuntime
- Time-step-by-time-step simulation output that the client can interrupt, branch, and steer mid-rollout. Different shape from one-shot completion.
T
- Tool useRuntime
- Model-initiated call to a registered tool (numerical solver, instrument driver, search index). Capability-gated; logged in the audit trace.
- TrajectoryModel
- A streamed series of time-step states from a forward-in-time simulation. Trajectories are interruptable, branchable and steerable mid-flight.
V
- VPCCommercial
- Virtual private cloud. Customer-controlled networking environment in AWS, GCP, Azure or OCI. Aether supports VPC deployment on the Team tier (as add-on) and Enterprise (included).
Missing a term?
If we use a word in load-bearing context that isn't defined here, file an issue or write to docs@apexworldlabs.com. The glossary grows monotonically.