Under current usage of the term, I think the bimetallic switch in my office thermostat qualifies as an AI.

Random forests are absolutely AI as the term has been used for a very long time in academia and in public.

I fear this kind of retconning will become more commonplace as new entrants to the space who are unfamiliar with the history of the field put words in the mouths of academics that academics themselves would vociferously reject.

Academics have long pushed back against the labeling of everything as "AI", and only the most public-facing ones with more than a buck to make on the hype treadmill ever stoop so low.

In academia, "AI" is usually reserved as a synonym of "AGI" in large part because of the fuzziness and lack of consensus around a good definition of "intelligence". The term is simply not applied to actual outputs of research because there's no way to justify calling anything "intelligence".

As the saying goes, what's the difference between ML and AI? ML is what the PhDs call it, AI is what the MBAs call it.

> In academia, "AI" is usually reserved as a synonym of "AGI"

Now this is retconning. I did my uni course called AI almost twenty years ago. The same processes had been called that for a long time.

Agree completely, particularly with the smirk I can see in the final word! As an academic, "AI" means "fund me". It's the new "big data". And "exponential" is the new "rising" (or, sometimes, "falling").