Not exactly. Google Translate was always a statistical approach from day one. That was the reason it was better than the rules engines that dominated before tha

Not exactly. Google Translate was always a statistical approach from day one. That was the reason it was better than the rules engines that dominated before that. The Translate guys really pioneered statistical machine translation. However it was all done with hand-crafted statistical functions and code. The new stuff using deep learning is the first time it'd have been referred to as "AI".