Plain English
Machine learning
Teaching computers by example: software learns patterns from data instead of following written rules.
A branch of AI where software learns patterns from examples rather than being programmed with rules. Spam filters, product recommendations and today’s language models are all machine learning.
Why it matters
It’s why AI is good with patterns and weak on rare exceptions: it can only learn from what it has seen.
At work
Your email’s spam filter learned what junk looks like from huge numbers of messages people marked as spam; nobody wrote a rule for every scam.
Think of it like learning to pick a ripe avocado by handling hundreds of them, rather than reading a rulebook.
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