TECH BASICS
Machine Learning
Software that gets better at a task by learning from examples, not fixed rules.
The simple version
Most software runs on rules a person wrote — "if this happens, do that." Machine learning is different: instead of writing exact rules, engineers feed a computer lots of examples, and it learns patterns on its own that it uses to make predictions or decisions.
For example
A spam filter doesn't have a hardcoded list of every spam email ever — it's learned patterns from millions of examples of spam and non-spam, so it can catch new spam it's never seen before. Recommendation feeds work the same way, learning from what you (and others) click on.
Go deeper
Machine learning is actually a broad category — it includes everything from simple pattern-matching to the large language models behind tools like chatbots. "AI" is often used loosely to mean the same thing, though technically AI is the broader goal and ML is one major way of getting there.
Why it matters
Machine learning now touches most major tech products in some way, from search results to fraud detection to your phone's autocomplete. Understanding the basic idea — learning from data instead of fixed rules — helps you make sense of a huge share of modern tech careers.