AI used to be called ML
which used to be called Statistics
which used to be called “math” or maybe “applied science.”
Obviously the underlying tech and research changed along the way… but not as much as it would seem. We’re still doing matrix operations and gradient descent and softmax, all of which has been around for a while.
This is not true because many older AI disciplines were not machine learning. A lot of work was put into tree search, logic programming, etc that we don’t count as ML. Older NLP work had little or no machine learning either.