How does machine learning improve security?

Ten years ago, antivirus companies the world over were about to face an important milestone in their history: the arrival of the millionth piece of malware known to man. Back in the day, each so-called "virus" was important: it had to be isolated, documented formally and dealt with by dozens of researchers gathered around a desk. Today, anti-malware companies get a million pieces of malware or more every two days. So it's easy to understand that these teams of reverse engineers now hardly have the time or resources to manually sift through this flood of malware. Collecting, inspecting and fixing things up for the customer are tedious tasks now offloaded to automated systems controlled by artificial intelligence.