Artificial Intelligence is the same thing as Machine Learning… Right?

First off, I don’t run a Data Science R&D team, I run a recruitment company, so those tuning in for my pro’s and con’s of Linear and Logistic Regression may want to stop here! In recruitment we work with a large and increasing number of firms and candidates who use Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science interchangeably, so I felt a simple break-down would be useful.

The first concept to understand is that ML is a subset of AI and Deep Learning (DL) a subset of ML, as demonstrated in this rather handy diagram below (which I had nothing to do with, if you drew it, let me know!).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech recognition and machine vision. (Margaret Rouse, Whatis.com)

Machine Learning (ML) “is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed.” — Stanford University

Or It’s a subset of AI which uses models/algorithms to enable machines to improve or “Learn” with experience. It enables a device or application to make data driven decisions to carry out a certain task. These devices and algorithms are designed so that they can learn and improve over time when new data becomes available.

Deep Learning (DL) is a subset of ML and a technique for enabling machine learning, unsupervised, from data that is unstructured or unlabelled. DL is considered the next evolution of machine learning.

So whilst all closely related and encompassed by the broadly defined AI, the terms are not interchangeable. In fairness, much of the confusion about AI is not from their overlapping meanings and components, but from companies and individuals “positioning” themselves as the next exciting AI thing. Everybody’s getting on-board the AI bandwagon, just like Big Data, just like Cloud, and with the whole tech and science market squeezing their products and services to fall under the AI banner, confusion will ensue.

But we’ll talk about that next time!

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