Prior to Deep Learning, Machine Learning community don't really associated themselves with Artificial Intelligence very often. The AI at the time, if I recall correctly, related more to 70s symbolism and heuristic search approach.
Now DL have became the dominant focus, people start to put AI/DL in every places possible, to ride the along the hype. For me it is deep learning that really leads the AI buzzword trend at this point.
General AI conferences such as IJCAI [1] and AAAI [2] have been publishing machine learning papers forever, just as they have been publishing constraint satisfaction-related papers, logics-related papers, multi-agent stuff papers, etc..
Of course non-generalist conferences such as ICML, UAI, AAMAS, etc. focus on more specific topics, and those are considered of the same level (A+) than IJCAI/AAAI. Their existence does not mean that anyone in those fields doesn't think they are not doing AI.
In fact, pretty much everyone agrees they are doing AI. If anyone does not agree on that, it is (part of) the pro-"symbolic reasoning" crowd, which sometimes claim only their "strong AI" approach is actual AI and everything else is just little more than mathematical tricks.
> Prior to Deep Learning, Machine Learning community don't really associated themselves with Artificial Intelligence very often. The AI at the time, if I recall correctly, related more to 70s symbolism and heuristic search approach.
It's more complicated than that.
First, the AI community had periodic tendencies that oscillated between philosophies and approaches. Every once in a while, someone would make a big contribution, that approach would bloom, then progress would slow for a number of years. There were previous periods where ANNs and other statistical methods were in vogue.
Second, it depends on what you define as the AI community and the ML community. For example, speech recognition people have been using Hidden Markov Models for years, which is a statistical/learning method. Is that AI? Is that ML?
Prior to Deep Learning, Machine Learning community don't really associated themselves with Artificial Intelligence very often. The AI at the time, if I recall correctly, related more to 70s symbolism and heuristic search approach.
Now DL have became the dominant focus, people start to put AI/DL in every places possible, to ride the along the hype. For me it is deep learning that really leads the AI buzzword trend at this point.