Yes, the point is LLMs are AI.

So, we’ve gone full circle. LLMs is a sub-category within the collection of ML techniques within the collection of AI techniques. Point is, AI is just a term here. A label, that indicates nothing about the abilities of LLMs to exert any form of intelligence or reasoning. In other words, the whole field of AI could (should?) have been named “computational statistics” or “mathematics applied to numerical datasets” (or whatever else you want, really…), and LLMs would absolutely belong to “CoStats”/“MAND” fields, for the same reason we say they relate to “AI” today, it’s just that nobody would be silly enough to call them “artificially intelligent”.

ML is AI too. But sales didn’t call it that because AI had the reputation of “just brute force with some heuristics”.

What sales are you even thinking about? What do even presume the market for ML algorithms to be? Nobody was shopping for support vector machines as a service, or spending tokens on linear regression, or using convolutional neural networks via API before the current LLM craze. What the field is experiencing right now is unheard of. Never before did the private sector jump gun on a niche technique and spent trillions to package, anthropomorphise and market it as if “AI has finally been figured out, and we happen not only to own it, but also to sell it to you”. This deceptive rhetoric would be a much tougher sell if some early computer scientists hadn’t happened to name their field “AI”.