Comment by johann28

ML was there but at least when I started learning about these things around 8 years ago, the label "AI" was mostly used for symbolic stuff. Courses named "AI" taught from the Russell-Norvig book. Things like resolution, planning in the block world, heuristic graph search, min-max trees, etc. ML existed but it wasn't really under the label of "AI" as far as I can remember. I think it's something of a marketing term that big companies like Google and Facebook reintroduced due to the scifi connotations. But that's just my guess.