Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning may still sound like vague concepts or insufficiently mature technologies to impact the average mobile device consumer in truly significant ways, but according to Google, one palpable development already made possible by something called TensorFlow is less spam than ever before in our Gmail inboxes.

Initially developed for internal Google use, the TensorFlow open-source machine learning (ML) framework was released under the Apache 2.0 license more than three years ago. Since then, “teams and researchers all over the world” have ...