How is Artificial Intelligence different from Machine Learning and Deep Learning?

You have been reading these buzzwords in the headlines on a daily basis. But, do you actually know the difference between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning? Or do you think they are all the same thing and can be used interchangeably? Here’s a rundown on the fundamentals to end your confusion.

At the heart of these technologies is data – big data to be precise. You feed a lot of data into the system, which it then uses to make decisions about other data. This forms the basis for deep learning – where a computer tries to mimic a human brain’s neural networks by classifying and finding correlations between different types of data. The more data the system has at this point, the more accurate its predictions will be. This is the technology powering Google’s image library. Twitter also uses deep learning to determine the best tweets that should be shown to a user first.

Now, these deep neural networks are essentially a subset of machine learning – which goes a step further than just finding correlations, to make predictions from that data. All this happens without human intervention or hand-coding a specific program into the computer. At this stage, even if the system makes a mistake in pattern recognition, over a period of time it learns to correct itself.

Machine learning systems are complex enough to interpret from a text whether someone is offering congratulations or registering a complaint and classify the two accordingly. You can trust this technology to recognize different music styles and segregate them into moods, like happy music or sad music.

Such human-like thinking is what makes machine learning a subset of artificial intelligence. In simple terms, artificial intelligence or AI is a technology which mimics cognitive human behavior to carry out the tasks assigned to it. Using deep learning and machine learning, artificial intelligence can connect the dots to offer smart assistance. It is the technology that personal assistant devices use for speech recognition or Instagram uses to filter out hateful comments. Even the auto-generated tags you see on your Facebook pictures are a result of this technology.

So, while artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are closely related, and even used interchangeably by some, they are not the same. Deep learning and machine learning are two subfields that are housed in a much broader concept of artificial intelligence. They are only a couple of techniques that AI uses to carry out tasks that we consider ‘smart’.