Amazon announced their latest innovation, Go. Think of Go as a futuristic grocery store. Using sensors, artificial intelligence and computer vision, Amazon is reinventing the shopping experience that we've all grown accustomed to for the last seventy years. If you want to buy an item, just grab it from the shelf, and then Amazon will automatically add the item to your virtual shopping cart. When you walk out of the store, Amazon will magically charge you for that item.

The tech ecosystem is well acquainted with buzzwords. From "Web 2.0" to "cloud computing" to "mobile first" to "on-demand," it seems as though each passing year heralds the advent and popularization of new catchphrases to which fledgling companies attach themselves. But while the trends these phrases represent are real, and category-defining companies will inevitably give weight to newly coined buzzwords, so too will derivative startups seek to take advantage of concepts that remain ill-defined by experts and little-understood by everyone else. Pitch decks and headlines today are lousy with references to "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning". But what do those terms really mean?