AI Is Not Magic. How Neural Networks Learn

In my previous blog post, I claimed that "AI is not magic." In this post, my goal is to discuss how neural networks learn, and show that AI isn't a crystal ball or magic, just science and some very slick mathematics. I'll keep this very high level. Let's start with a hypothetical scenario. Suppose we are building an app to identify hot dogs. Take a picture and the app will tell you if it's a hotdog or not.