How machine learning actually works, where it is genuinely useful, and where the marketing runs ahead of the product.
Most "AI-powered" home gadgets are ordinary automation with a marketing budget. Here is where machine learning genuinely earns its place in a house, and where it is still a party trick.
A language model is a very good next-word guesser trained on an enormous amount of text. Everything surprising about it follows from that one sentence, including the mistakes.
Code generation has genuinely changed how software gets written. It has changed the job far less than the headlines suggest, and the reason is that typing was never the bottleneck.
Most writing on this subject stays at the level of principles nobody disagrees with. This is about the specific decisions that determine whether a system treats people fairly, and what the law now expects you to document.
Individual tutoring is one of the most effective interventions in education and has always been unaffordable at scale. That is the real promise here - and the reason the marketing keeps overshooting it.
A character who can say anything sounds like the future of games. In practice it creates four problems that game designers have spent thirty years learning to avoid.
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