IMO, the “black box” thing is basically ML developers hand waiving and saying “it’s magic” because they know it will take way too long to explain all the underlying concepts in order to even start to explain how it works.

I have a very crude understanding of the technology. I’m not a developer, I work in IT support. I have several friends that I’ve spoken to about it, some of whom have made fairly rudimentary machine learning algorithms and neural nets. They understand it, and they’ve explained a few of the concepts to me, and I’d be lying if I said that none of it went over my head. I’ve done programming and development, I’m senior in my role, and I have a lifetime of technology experience and education… And it goes over my head. What hope does anyone else have? If you’re not a developer or someone ML-focused, yeah, it’s basically magic.

I won’t try to explain. I couldn’t possibly recall enough about what has been said to me, to correctly explain anything at this point.