What AI & Machine Learning Actually Are

AI is a big umbrella, machine learning is the part of it that learns rules from examples instead of being hand-coded, and today's chatbots are powerful pattern-matchers - not minds - that can be confidently wrong.

1. AI vs ML vs Deep Learning vs LLMs AI is the big umbrella, machine learning is the part of AI that learns from data, deep learning is the part of ML that uses neural networks, and today's LLMs are one famous kind of deep learning - four nested circles, not four rival things.
2. Rules vs Learning Traditional code is rules a human writes by hand; machine learning shows the machine examples and lets it learn the rules itself - a shift that wins when the rules are too messy to write down, and loses when they aren't.
3. What AI Is and Isn't Today's AI is powerful pattern-matching and prediction, not understanding - which is why it can be confidently wrong, mirrors the biases in its training data, and has no built-in sense of what's true.