Machine Learning (ML)
Definition
A way of building software that learns patterns from examples rather than following rules a programmer wrote by hand. Instead of someone coding every instruction, you show the system thousands of examples and it works out the patterns itself. Most of what people call "AI" today is built on machine learning. When a tool gets better at recognising your voice or sorting your photos, machine learning is usually doing the work underneath.
Why It Matters
It's the foundation almost everything else sits on. Understand this one word and a good deal of the rest starts making sense.
What does that look like in practice?
Your photo app learns to recognise your dog across hundreds of pictures without anyone writing a rule for 'dog.' That's machine learning.
What people actually mean when they say this
When someone says 'the system learns,' they mean it spotted patterns in examples, not that it studies or understands anything the way a person does.
Last reviewed: June 2026
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