What is AI, or what counts as AI, has always had a large element of "things seem hard must be AI" For years most people agreed that a computer beating the best

What is AI, or what counts as AI, has always had a large element of "things seem hard must be AI" For years most people agreed that a computer beating the best human at chess would be "real" AI. Then they managed it, but people said "not that does not count, you just brute forced it". What you describe, the automatic construction of classification models was textbook AI for over 20 years (using a whole range of methods), now it's often just seen as "data science".