It's certainly AI
It's applied AI. I mean, it's a *very* broad term, and many people assume AI == General AI, which is never the case. General AI is a human like (or probably very different, but human capable) intelligence. This isn't it :)
But it is one of those practical applications of AI techniques, and getting anything working in the real world is quite tricky. Hence why solving games, even complex games, is relatively* trivial, but getting a robot to do a random task that a four year old can do is extremely difficult. Like 2-3 engineers minimum, unless you've got mechanical, electrical and robotics for the hardware, and programming, image processing and modeling for the back end in a single person.
Oh, and a four year old can do natural language processing better than an adult, and certainly better than any current AI
Nice to see some news being covered about actual applied robotics. Too much press coverage is "Westworld or bust".
* Specifically, building an agent that can play the game in the 95th percentile can be achieved by self play, which is mainly a matter of throwing time, hardware and efficient coding at the problem.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
