While I agree that AI is more salient, I feel like there was a ton of press about the "Algorithm" especially around social media and content, which is essentially "ML"

> here is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles.

No, not at all. That was a chief complaint. Grandma doesnt give a fuck about machine learning, why are they advertising it?

> I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.

Right. And that's why this isnt an example of the phenomena. Nowhere did I say machine learning was useless.