What are the main differences between artificial intelligence and machine learning? Is machine learning a part of artificial intelligence?

Machine learning is a particular approach to Artificial intelligence. It is true that it is proving to me the most successful approach to AI. 

For example, you’d be surprised to hear that some of the self-driving cars that currently describing themselves as using AI, use very little machine learning and are mostly using rule-based systems.

 The most AI applications nowadays are indeed using or will use ML soon. On the other hand, Deep Learning, which is itself a kind of Machine Learning is becoming more and more popular and successful at a different use case. However, it does not even represent a majority of the applications.

What is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

Although there are often lots of hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI), once we strip away the marketing fluff, what is revealed is a rapidly developing technology that is already changing our lives. But to fully appreciate its potential, we need to understand what it is and what it is not!

Defining “intelligence” is tricky, but key attributes include logic, reasoning, conceptualization, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity, abstract thinking, and problem-solving. From here we move onto the ideas of self, of sentience, and of being. Artificial Intelligence is, therefore, a machine that possesses one or many of these characteristics.

However, no matter how you define it, one of AI’s central aspects of learning. For a machine to demonstrate any kind of intelligence it must be able to learn.

When most technology companies talk about AI, they are in fact talking about Machine Learning (ML) — the ability for machines to learn from past experiences to change the outcome of future decisions. Stanford University defines machine learning as “the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed.”

What distinguishes AI and non-AI algorithms? Does the media just call every computer algorithm an AI nowadays?

Computer programs map a sequence of input data to an output. For instance, you might give a program a sequence of people data records and a program might give out the mean age of the people.

When the mapping between the input and output is done by hand through programmer created logic, then it falls into traditional programming. Think of sorting. You think through the quicksort algorithm, implement a sequence of steps and then return a sorted algorithm.

Artificial Intelligence

If the mapping between the input and output is not through a defined sequence of steps coded directly by a programmer, but a model that evolves through iterations defined by the programmer, that's AI. For instance, in face recognition, we don’t directly map the sequence of pixels to words through any defined sequence of instructions, but build a model that creates a mapping between an image and a person’s name.

The mapping in a machine learning program can be thought to be a matrix that when multiplied with the input results in the desired output.

A traditional program would return the same output for a given input, but a learning algorithm can get better (or worse!) over time as the weights get altered.