Machine learning is the engine behind most modern AI. Instead of a programmer writing exact rules for every situation, an ML system is shown many examples and learns the patterns itself. Show it thousands of photos labelled "cat" or "not cat" and it gradually learns what a cat looks like — without anyone defining "cat" in code.
This matters because many real-world problems are too messy for hand-written rules. Language, images and human behaviour have endless exceptions. Learning from data lets a system handle cases its creators never explicitly anticipated. The trade-off is that an ML model is only as good, and as fair, as the data it learned from.
Related terms
Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Training Data · Neural Network