Google’s move to give away its latest machine-learning software, key to its speech- and photo-recognition programs, isn’t as crazy as it may appear. The unit of Alphabet Inc. said Monday it is releasing its TensorFlow system for free under an open-source...

“New Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience,” reads a headline on the front page of The New York Times this morning. The article focuses on machine-learning algorithms, known as a neural networks, that are becoming increasingly important in computer...