chatbot

Definition

Any system you converse with in natural language. The word predates modern LLMs — it once meant rule-based or retrieval-based dialogue systems — but today it almost always denotes an instruction-tuned language model wrapped in a chat interface. The useful distinction is between the base model and the deployed product, since the latter adds a system prompt, safety layers, tools, and conversation state that shape behaviour as much as the weights do.

Explainers using this term

• LLM-as-a-Judge from Scratch — How AI Grades AI, and Where It BreaksJudging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena