Based on the paper I linked, it seems like a straight up classical sampling and clustering with baysian hyperparameter tuning. This is “everything is now AI” slop that’s infected all grants, academic and private industry fundraising. There’s no neural net or LLM involved.

That's machine learning.

Clustering alone is machine learning and has been taught as such to innumerable people.

I have deep feelings about this, someone in management taking exactly one Kaggle course managed to wield this knowledge to great damage.

But it is machine learning.

Additionally, it goes far beyond clustering: the article you linked describes training an image recognition model, which also seems to be heavily stressed in the article linked on HN.