Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning

I was having dinner with a friend the other night and I was explaining to him our advancement in the AIOps space. He wanted to know the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I thought it would be a great topic to share.

AI is a broad term that encompasses all techniques and technologies that enable machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as perception, reasoning, learning, and decision-making. AI is mimicking behavior. Machine learning is a specific subset of AI that involves the use of statistical algorithms and models to enable machines to learn from data and improve their performance over time without being explicitly programmed....but requires features from humans.

Using the example of cats and dogs, here's how AI and machine learning differ:

AI: If we want a computer to recognize cats and dogs, we can use AI to build a system that can process images and identify patterns that are common to both cats and dogs. This system might include various algorithms and techniques such as computer vision, pattern recognition, and natural language processing. However, this system would require human experts to explicitly define the rules and features that are used to identify cats and dogs. This type of approach is sometimes called "rule-based AI."

Machine Learning: Alternatively, we could use machine learning to train a computer to recognize cats and dogs on its own, without being explicitly programmed. To do this, we would need to provide the computer with a large dataset of images of cats and dogs, along with labels indicating which images are cats and which are dogs. The computer would then use machine learning algorithms to analyze the images and learn to identify the features that distinguish cats from dogs. Once the computer has been trained, it can be used to recognize cats and dogs in new images that it has never seen before.

In summary, AI is a broader term that includes various techniques and technologies, while machine learning is a specific subset of AI that involves the use of statistical algorithms and models to enable machines to learn from data. Both AI and machine learning can be used to recognize cats and dogs, but machine learning allows the computer to learn on its own without being explicitly programmed.

-Scott Anderson