Comment by ComputerGuru

I’m not sure I agree? For each of your examples there are algorithmic approaches and neural network approaches. Companies have certainly been loose and wild with how they market these, but there remain distinct approaches and implementations for each. Very generally speaking, the neural network based approaches (aka “generative AI”) perform better but with much worse degenerative cases and a higher baseline rate of unwanted side effects (that are normally not immediately visible but tend to cause issues down the line).

My bigger concern is that these neural network based solutions have taken the place of the former rather than supplemented them. Many tools no longer provide the algorithmic/kernel-based approach at all, and have marketed the “AI” (née ML) alternative as a strict superset/upgrade, despite its potential drawbacks.

(Interestingly while the inference-based implementations generally have higher latency (or infinitely worse, cloud and pay-as-you-go requirements), for some computationally difficult kernels the inference-based approach is actually faster!