What Machine Learning Is — Programs That Learn from Data
Most of this blog's AI content sits on top of machine learning without ever defining it. This series fixes that from the ground up: before transformers and LLMs, before fine-tuning and RAG, there is the plain idea of a program that improves at a task by learning patterns from data instead of being explicitly told the rules. Understanding that idea — and its three core flavors — is the foundation everything else in modern AI is built on.
Before transformers and LLMs there is the plain idea of a program that learns patterns from data instead of being told the rules. What machine learning is, the vocabulary (features, model, training, generalization), and the three paradigms — supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement — the whole AI stack is built on.