I would say the current wave of AI is just training and inference.

Training is getting computers to recognize a pattern by giving positive and negative examples. It uses huge compute and you get a model.

Inference is using that model to recognize that pattern in new data. It uses less resources, so it can process lots of data quickly or work on a small system.

So when I hear hand-wavy stuff, I just sort of mentally think - what pattern are they looking for, what is their source data and what data will they use it on.