There’s a meaningful difference between ML algorithms and the Grail that is (general) AI. Many of us spent years arguing that words matter and now with the VC backed hype train just about everything is AI, under penalty of stock market collapse

Because just about everything is AI. AI in itself is a rather useless term, and that was years ago.

The differences are not really that great most of the time. Quite often one type of logic in one type of ML network can be easily simulated in something like a generic transformer network and vice versa. Efficiency is typically the biggest constraint.