[evgen]

Regardless of whether Matlab is a good language, it is looked at as a one-trick pony. You would never instinctively reach for Matlab to write a quick web server or to scrape a third-party API. What Python brings is all of the math and data analysis code that was noted and everything else in the Python ecosystem. It is not just that you get the Numpy, Scipy, scikit, etc collection but you also get to add everything else Python is used for as a bonus. This leads to virtuous circles where the AI/ML code is made easy to apply to other domains, so it becomes more widely known within that domain and this in turn leads to more support for those same AI/ML libraries.