Glossary

What is Machine learning?

Machine learning is how AI learns: by finding patterns in examples on its own, not from rules a person types in.

With ordinary software, a person writes down exactly what the program should do. Machine learning works differently. You give the system lots of examples, and it finds the patterns in them by itself. A spam filter learns what spam is by seeing thousands of examples of spam and not-spam.

What this means for you

It is the engine under almost all of today's AI. It also explains why the quality of the examples (the data) matters so much for the result.

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Last reviewed: 19 June 2026.