AI: What is Machine Learning?

My name is Ale Flores, and I'm product
manager at Alexa.

My name is Dr. Chelsea Haupt. I work at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence,

and I work on an AI-powered academic search engine.

All around you, computers are making
decisions, and those decisions affect

your daily life. When you do an internet
search or scroll through your newsfeed,

computers decide what you see.

Computers can already recognize your face and understand your voice,

soon they'll be driving cars and detecting diseases, even better than humans.

So how is any of this possible?

You may have heard of something called AI or artificial intelligence.

True artificial intelligence is decades away.

But a type of AI is here today, called Machine Learning.

It's a type of AI you probably interact with every day, without knowing it.

It has the opportunity to help us tackle some of the world's biggest challenges.

Machine learning is how computers recognize patterns, and make decisions

without being explicitly programmed.

What's so exciting, is that it's a completely
different way to program a computer than

what we've ever done before.

With machine learning, instead of programming a computer step by step,

you can program to learn just like you learn, through trial and error, and lots of practice.

Learning comes from experience, and that's true for machine learning too.

In this case, "experience" means lots and lots of data.

Machine learning can take in any kind of data:

Images, video, audio, or text, and begin to
recognize patterns in that data.

Once it learns to recognize patterns in the data, it can also learn to make predictions

based on those patterns.

Like noticing the difference between an image of a car, and an image of a bicycle.

AI and machine learning are playing a bigger and bigger role in society at large,

and shaping all of our futures.

That's why it's so important to learn how it works, with some hands-on experience.

You're about to get the chance to train your own machine learning model.

Remember, AI is like any tool: first you get the knowledge, then you get the power!