From the article: "The game industry spends all its computational time trying to render a scene, leaving almost nothing left for the AI routines, forcing them to rely on techniques from 1968. Think about that - we are approaching the point where AI in games comes down to a 50-year old technique that was considered hopelessly outdated before I was even born."

This can hardly be considered a problem of ray tracing specifically. And the A* algorithm is a perfectly decent algorithm for path-finding. The notion that an algorithm that does its job should be disregarded just because it is old is ridiculous.