What this really reflects is that before these problems were solved it was assumed (without any real evidence) the solutions required something like intelligenc

What this really reflects is that before these problems were solved it was assumed (without any real evidence) the solutions required something like intelligence. But that turned out to not be the case, and “AI” is the wrong term to use. There’s also the effect of “machine learning” being used imprecisely so it inhabits a squishy middle between “computational statistics” and “AI.”