This is essentially true, and I'm sad that someone is so caught up in the hype that they'd downvote a simple description of the actual state of the field.

What we have right now is a boom in AI engineering, with AI research fairly neglected because it doesn't produce the same kind of hype.

Here's a Twitter thread [1] where NLP researchers describe people who work on machine translation as 'depressed', because they spend their time tweaking neural net parameters to get tiny improvements over the best techniques of last decade, with no opportunity to understand what causes an improvement.

[1] https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/805055952789573635