I can't state this strongly enough: machine learning is not hype. It has been going strong longer than you may realize, has been generating more sustained reven

I can't state this strongly enough: machine learning is not hype. It has been going strong longer than you may realize, has been generating more sustained revenue than you may realize, and has been disrupting (ugh sorry, I hate that term) more industries than you may realize. I started my career working at company that built its first machine learning based systems in the mid 80s. Very successfully, too: their early products are ubiquitous today, and probably will be for a long time. You almost certainly indirectly use them several times a week without realizing it if you don't leave your money under a mattress (I don't want to go into too much detail because it's a small industry, but it's related to banking and finance). Google is, at its heart, a machine learning company that branched out as it grew. Pagerank was developed more than 20 years ago, and transformed the internet; can you imagine using the internet without it and its successors? I could go on, but the fact is 100s of billions of dollars of value in the economy are a direct result of machine learning or were enabled solely due to machine learning. And this has been true for a long time. Sure, it's very popular right now, but it's not going away any time soon. Calling machine learning hype is like calling the internet hype because of the 1999 internet bubble.