The thread is full of people debating what AI means and whether ML/optimization algorithms count as AI. Laypeople don't think of machine learning when they see

The thread is full of people debating what AI means and whether ML/optimization algorithms count as AI. Laypeople don't think of machine learning when they see AI, they think of chatbots. I would argue even for a techy magazine this is a bad term to use without spending two sentences to clarify the distinction. Examples of people being confused: rlt: The discovering itself doesn’t seem like the interesting part. If the discovery wasn’t in the training data then it’s a sign AI can produce novel scientific research / experiments. wizzwizz4 in reply: It's not that kind of AI. We know that these algorithms can produce novel solutions. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04258 https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04258, specifically "Urania". About a quarter of the comments here I just have to assume what definition of AI they're talking about, which changes the meaning and context significantly.