Today’s AI is ‘alchemy,’ not science

Skimming it, I think they're not talking about academic deep learning research but about all the posturing around "AI" that various charlatans are up to.

Actual AI research often isn't very rigorous and is more "try a bunch of stuff and see what works" but it's not magic, it's just experimental as we don't really understand all the factors that affect model performance.

AI is more like a religion.

Lots of quasi-educated people are firmly convinced that "intelligence" is just an emergent property of some large binary software.

They believe this despite never seeing a single example of it and without being able to show or describe what will be required to make it happen.

Belief and hope is *not* how real science and engineering is done. However; it *is* how religion is done.