inference

American  

[in-fer-uhns, -fruhns] / ˈɪn fər əns, -frəns /

noun

1. the act or process of inferring.

2. something that is inferred.

   to make rash inferences.

3. Logic.

   1. the process of deriving the strict logical consequences of assumed premises.

   2. the process of arriving at some conclusion that, though it is not logically derivable from the assumed premises, possesses some degree of probability relative to the premises.

   3. a proposition reached by a process of inference.

---

inference British  

/ ˈɪnfərəns, -frəns /

noun

1. the act or process of inferring

2. an inferred conclusion, deduction, etc

3. any process of reasoning from premises to a conclusion

4. logic the specific mode of reasoning used See also deduction induction

---

inference Cultural  

1. In logic, the deriving of one idea from another. Inference can proceed through either induction or deduction.

---

inference Idioms  

1. see draw an inference.

---

Other Word Forms

• misinference noun
• preinference noun
• superinference noun

Etymology

Origin of inference

From the Medieval Latin word inferentia, dating back to 1585–95. See infer, -ence

Example Sentences

“Efficiencies come from architecture innovations, inference improvements, engineering optimizations and reduction in the cost of compute,” they say.

From The Wall Street Journal

But the company’s increased AI investment is expected to weigh on margins, as integrating third-party models like Claude leads to rising infrastructure and inference costs.

From MarketWatch

One of the big questions for Nvidia is whether it can maintain its market-leading position as demand for chips shifts toward inference —the process of generating answers or results from models—over training.

From Barron's

That is because the processors designed by companies including Nvidia, Google, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices require more and faster memory chips for both model training and inference, or the process of responding to queries.

From The Wall Street Journal

As AI models get larger context windows, or the ability to process more data at one time, they need more memory capacity to handle inference.

From MarketWatch

Related Words

• assumption
• conjecture
• interpretation
• presumption
• reasoning
• supposition