Some machine-learning research aims to explain phenomena and develop theory; mathematical theories are often not very predictive, while informal theories about what is happening are common.

“then there's also like more uh there's research that's more oriented towards explaining things and like uh developing a theory or a sort of yeah often we don't have like mathematical theories in machine learning that are that um predictive but we have like a lot of um like more informal theories”

“um for what's going on”