[cratermoon]

Granted that emergent behaviors are important. The reason for injecting "just" is to counter the AI hype. Imagine if the headline read "With a nudge from linear algebra, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment". Dropping the word AI in there, in addition to boosting the articles SEO, will suggest to those with a casual interest that his must be a big deal, because "I've heard so much about how AI is solving <insert big problem here>"

[edejong]

Well, if you dive into data science and ML, you'll see it is much more than just a bit of linear algebra. Some topics (and as a data engineer, I am not an expert):

- Distributed computing

- Feature selection

- Budgeting / accounting of experimental design (these TPU clusters are not cheap)

- ML architecture

- Involvement of domain experts (multidisciplinary teams)

- Storage

The whole list is much longer, but just some topics to think about. For me the term "AI", although overly broad, come to mean the engineering and organisation needed to pull these kind of projects.