I don't understand the backlash here. The jist seemed to be traditional tools that are exact take a long time to process complex designs. Deep learning offers a statistical approach that can give a 'coarse' prediction and they're using this to reduce development time. That seems to make sense to me, especially in the earlier verification phases of the hardware design lifecycle.

To me this sounds like a good use-case of AI and Neural Nets. It doesn't appear to be looking to replace the traditional tools, just augment.