The last decades saw a huge rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a powerful tool to boost industrial and scientific research in a broad range of fields. AI and photonics are developing a promising two-way synergy: on the one hand, AI approaches can be used to control a number of complex linear and nonlinear photonic processes, both in the classical and quantum regimes; on the other hand, photonics can pave the way for a new class of platforms to accelerate AI-tasks. This review provides the reader with the fundamental notions of machine learning (ML) and neural networks (NNs) and presents the main AI applications in the fields of spectroscopy and chemometrics, computational imaging (CI), wavefront shaping and quantum optics. The review concludes with an overview of future developments of the promising synergy between AI and photonics
