If I'm understanding correctly, this was not AI in any sense.

This was collaborative filtering. Which is great and useful, but it's just simple statistics. You can write it in a SQL query a few lines long.

Or you can run more robust models using SVD (singular value decomposition) to reduce dimensionality and enable a form of statistical inference. I can't tell if Ringo/Firefly were using that or not. (If you have enough users, and a relatively limited set of objects like musical artists, you don't need this.)

But nobody calls these AI -- not now and not at the time. They're very clearly in the realm of statistics.

So the article is fun, but not everything needs to jump on the AI train, c'mon.