An analogy for Machine Learning: It's like baking a cake without a recipe (opens in new tab)

I wrote this post after giving a talk on AI to a non-technical audience. I found that the analogy of baking a cake without a recipe was a powerful way to build intuition for how ML models are trained and, more importantly, the common ways they can fail.

I hope this is a useful mental model, whether you're an expert trying to explain your work or a newcomer to the field.

I'm here to answer any questions.

I'm also curious: what are your favorite analogies for explaining complex technical topics?