Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that involves the use of algorithms and statistical models to enable a system to improve its performance on a specific task over time, without being explicitly programmed to do so. ML algorithms are trained on a dataset, which contains examples of the inputs and desired outputs for the task. The algorithm uses this training data to learn the relationship between the inputs and outputs, and to make predictions or decisions on new data. This allows the system to automatically improve its performance on the task over time, as it is exposed to more data. ML is widely used in many different fields, including image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and recommendation systems.