AI and ML

 

Starting this KYT series with some hot, new topics. The goal is to put forward a simplified version of the supposedly complex subjects around tech and products. The aim would be to keep the reading time of these updates for less than two minutes. This is a journey to learn together, so please highlight if there are mistakes made or if you have more to add to the subject.

Kicking this off with the hottest words these days – Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning.

What is AI?

In the very simplest definitions, AI is a set of tasks where a computer can make decisions. From that lens, even writing a formula in an excel or writing a macro is AI. Of course, the perception around the word is around much bigger use cases these days. This is not surprising because AI has grown from solving simple problems to more complex asks. Today, when we think about AI, we think auto-driving cars and robots.

There can be two types of AI – 1) rule-based and 2) machine learning. Which brings to the question:

What is machine learning?

ML is a set of tasks where a computer can make decisions *based on data*. If your program or the machine is learning from some past behaviour and if the success rate is improving because of this learning, it is ML. Here, the machine acquires its own knowledge or ‘learns’ by extracting patterns from the raw data.

In future notes, we will try to dive deep into some of these topics.

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