[oktavist]

People that think ML/AI isn't statistics typically haven't studied statistics, or have a marketing agenda. I can tolerate the latter as a fact of life. But the former ... there is often a disturbing lack of statistical understanding in "ML/AI" practitioners at the ground level, even though the vast majority of their tooling is built on basic multivariate statistics. It's rather inevitable give the sudden sex-appeal of the field, but will lead to an 'AI winter' as those folks over promise and under-deliver. Computational statistics, statistical learning, machine learning, pick your term certainly continues to progress as computational horsepower improves. But as another commenter noted, physicists/chemists still self-identify with quantum mechanics even though the computational methods/approximations for molecular dynamics continue to rapidly improve.

[nojvek]

Not sure about AI winter. I think a lot of advances are fuel by GPUs, ASICs and colossal datasets. Also opensourcing the frameworks makes it easier for new comers.

We can recognize objects, recognize speech, at almost human level accuracies. That's a big milestone when you think about it.

Also technology improves exponentially when a ton of smart people funded by crazy fuck you money work on pushing it forward.

[quantum_state]

I would second what you said ...