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It's not something that's out of reach for a web dev. It might seem like an insurmountable task, but if you break it down, you can digest it easier.

ML is just math. We're at a point where you don't even have to completely grok the math to apply ML techniques productively.

If you want somewhere to start and need a project idea, read up on how to build a simple binary classifier. The "hard" work is building good training and validation sets if you use a ML framework.