Why is Machine Learning and AI so popular these days?

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Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) seem to be the latest buzzwords in the market today. Everybody wants to advertise their enterprise as an AI enterprise and everybody gets impressed if it is actually so. So what is it that has made these terms so popular? Following are a few reasons that I believe to be the reasons for this fame:

Access to technology: 

In modern times, the access to technology and internet is unbelievable. More people have access to computer systems and internet than ever before. As such, it becomes natural for coding related domains (including ML and AI) to flourish.

Availability of online resources to learn: 

I mean, this comes as an obvious point. Presently, all kinds of courses are available on platforms like YouTube free of cost for anyone willing to learn. Also there are MOOC's offered by various universities online which has democratized education in an unbelievable way.

Availability of data (or Big Data): 

Data is available rather easily in large amounts these days. With so many transactions happening all the time, businesses are generating data like never before. A lot of this data is made available to open-source or worked privately upon using ML algorithms.

Presence of hardware components like GPU:

Hardware components like GPU have become mainstream, making exceptional parallel computing power available to the masses and parallel computing paves the way for executing computationally demanding code.

Availability of Cloud-based services

Availability of Cloud-based services further add to the ease of  the process as a person could just use these to perform processing and storage operations. Even if you don't have your own ultra workstation, you could just rent out some cloud service for some time to run the desired operation further adding to the access of technology. 

Open-source libraries

Lastly, open-source libraries like Scikit-learn, Keras, etc., make it possible for people to use ML algorithms rather freely. Earlier you had to code basic algorithms like gradient descent from scratch and this limited the number of people that could engage with machine learning. But now, with internet and the presence of an active open source community, plethora of libraries exist that do these things for you. Even without any knowledge, you can think of ML and AI because of this very reason, which is why you see so many ML and AI application these days.

Do you agree with me or do you think there is some reason that I missed?

Note:
One important thing to point out is that you need to be careful while dealing with these AI companies that claim to be using cutting-edge technology to do something. A lot of times, it is just a PR stunt intended for marketing. Do your research and try out the product yourself before getting swayed by their sweet dreamy words.

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