Agree. Feng-hsiung Hsu, the chief designer of Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat Kasparov, once gave a talk at my university. I didn't go to the talk, but in the abstract, he stated clearly that he didn't think Deep Blue is AI -- it's just a search algorithm.
I don't understand why so many commenters here are so furious about the author's claim that AlphaGo is not AI. What qualifies as AI is really up to definition, and there doesn't seem to be any widely accepted one among AI researchers. The author of the IEEE article doesn't think AlphaGo matches his definition of AI. Other AI researchers may think otherwise. But that doesn't mean the author is trying to dismiss the achievement of the AlphaGo team.