Most software is just reacting to inputs, yes, and AI algorithms are no different there. But one should recognise the inherent reductionism in any such statemen

Most software is just reacting to inputs, yes, and AI algorithms are no different there. But one should recognise the inherent reductionism in any such statements claiming that that's all AI is. Even if/when we do have AGI, it will still, arguably, just be software (plus hardware) that is reacting to inputs — such a definition helps nobody in this instance. What about these things: - Speech recognition - Facial detection/recognition - Fingerprint recognition - Personal agents (Siri/Alexa/etc) - Self-driving cars - Recommendation engines - Route planning - Spam detection All of these things have either improved significantly thanks to AI, or would not exist without AI (that is: many of these algorithms are in fact categorised as being AI). Of course, as others also point out: once it's been solved, most folk don't categorise it as AI any longer, it's merely "just another algorithm". Furthermore, some manufacturers are now including dedicated hardware-acceleration for some of these algorithms, in mobile devices (e.g. Apple's A11 and A12). Granted, yes, many recent advances are "nothing other than pattern matching or machine learning" but that's a very wide brush you are weilding. One day even AGI may be classed as "nothing other than machine learning". No, we don't yet have AGI. But yes: AI is really a thing, and it's here now, hype or not. [TBH, I'm uncertain if you're trolling or not, but hey]