You must be thinking of a different machine learning. All the on-device machine learning, backend machine learning, OCR, etc. was all called "machine learning" before LLMs. Yes, the field of artificial intelligence still existed, often used machine learning, and called the result "AI". But Apple would call keyboard prediction machine learning. Microsoft would call OCR machine learning. YouTube called machine transcription machine learning. Google called camera image enhancement machine learning.

Microsoft now calls everything AI (actually mostly "Copilot"). YouTube now calls everything AI (including genuine LLMs and generative features, but also everything it used to call machine learning). Google now calls everything AI (including everything it used to call machine learning). Apple is seemingly the only one immune.

My argument is not that no one ever used "AI" to refer to a product that utilized machine learning, but rather that the term of art in the industry for machine learning itself was actually "machine learning", not "AI", until LLMs took over and made it "AI".

You would not pull a library off the shelf for "AI", it would be for machine learning. You would not implement and perform "AI", but machine learning. Even central parts of the AI ecosystem like PyTorch advertise as being for "deep learning", which is a subset of machine learning. Not "AI".

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awwaiid 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Counter example, the book that is the foundation of much coursework and learning for people in AI, has a whole section on "Machine Learning" with all that k-means and such in there - https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

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LoganDark 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm really not sure how that's a counterexample. The section is called machine learning, not AI. Machine learning is a useful tool for artificial intelligence, so I'd be surprised if a book about AI did not talk about it.

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awwaiid 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm saying that Machine Learning was borne of AI from the very beginning. ML has become specialized enough that we may later (much much later) declare it somehow larger/separate/overlapping, but it originated from AI as the generic umbrella.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

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fragmede 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Machine learning is just what we call AI that works.

	▲	LoganDark 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Math is just what we call a video game that works. What?

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techpression 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you. I was starting to think the history revision was almost true, but your recollection is very much in sync with my own. Everything was machine learning, nobody talked about AI unless it was for research, now marketing has changed that, unfortunately.

	▲	thaumasiotes 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Everything was machine learning, nobody talked about AI unless it was for research Machine learning was AI. The specific wording was a branding choice, because "AI" was a deeply stigmatized brand. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter ) But there was not a conceptual division. There's a close analogue to how modern genetic researchers are happy to tell you that your genome is not informative as to your "race", but it is informative as to your "ancestry".