I'm all for a renarrowing of the use of AI to no longer just cover any machine learning algorithm to be honest. It was a really annoying feature of the 2010s that any kind of machine learning application got the hype word du jour slapped on it.

The problem is it is just ML all the way down… I mean even AlphaFold used transformer models, I thought.

At least LLMs act somewhat like an AI rather than just working in a singular hyper specific domain like so many ML projects that can only do one extremely specific thing. You're right it's still /just/ ML underneath but I'm still happy AI as a term is shrinking a little.

And going even further, curve fitting.