What's Machine Learning? It's Expensive, Slow and Exclusive -- For Now

AI and NLP are two acronyms many in the world of chatbots toss around glibly, sometimes without understanding themselves what these terms mean. There's a third acronym that's an essential component beneath these two: ML, which stands for machine learning. Machine learning is a lot easier to explain in one tweet than AI or NLP: It's the process by which an advanced software system trains itself from a massive set of examples, rather than being explicitly programmed with rigid algorithms devised by human coders. Over time, it gets better and better as it acquires more data to train on. An ML system is still programmed with standard one-and-zero logic, but it's programmed to modify its behavior to meet specified goals based on patterns it discovers in the sample data.