Chapter 1. The Machine Learning Landscape
Not so long ago, if you had picked up your phone and asked it to tell you the way home, it would have ignored you—and people would have questioned your sanity. But machine learning is no longer science fiction: billions of people use it every day. And the truth is it has actually been around for decades in some specialized applications, such as optical character recognition (OCR). The first ML application that really became mainstream, improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people, discretely took over the world back in the 1990s: the spam filter. It’s not exactly a self-aware robot, but it does technically qualify as machine learning: it has actually learned so well that you seldom need to flag an email as spam anymore. Then thanks to big data, hardware improvements, and a few algorithmic innovations, hundreds of ML applications followed and now quietly power hundreds of products and features that you use regularly: voice prompts, automatic translation, image search, product recommendations, and many more. And finally came ChatGPT, Gemini (formerly Bard), Claude, Perplexity, and many other chatbots: AI is no longer just powering services in the background, it is the service itself.
Where does machine learning start and where does it end? What exactly does it mean for a machine to learn something? If I download a copy of all Wikipedia articles, has my computer really learned something? Is it suddenly smarter? In this chapter I ...
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