> I'm half expecting to see "AI model" appearing as stand-in for "linear regression" at this point in the cycle.

Already the case with consulting companies, have seen it myself

I'm half expecting to see "AI model" appearing as stand-in for "if > 0" at this point in the cycle.

There is an HIGGS dataset [1]. As name suggest, it is designed to apply machine learning to recognize Higgs bozon.

[1] https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/HIGGS

In my experiments, linear regression with extended (addition of squared values) attributes is very much competitive in accuracy terms with reported MLP accuracy.

I'm sure I've seen basic hill climbing (and other optimisation algorithms) described as AI, and then used evidence of AI solving real-world science/engineering problems.

And why not, when linear regression works, it works so well it's basically magic, better than intelligence, artificial or otherwise

Having work with people who do that, I can guarantee that’s not the case. See https://ssummers.web.cern.ch/conifer/ and HSL4ML, these run BDT and CNN

That works well to get around patents btw :)