What did they call it before? As the article mentions, CMU has been doing AI for a long time.
https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/academic/undergraduate/bachelors-curr...
So that student would pick AI-ish classes using their applications elective and two CS electives.
In contrast, the AI curriculum:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu...
Removes several of the required courses from the CS curriculum (such as the upper-division systems requirement - OS/networking/distributed systems and the logic & languages requirement), adds another required math course (modern regression), and then uses the space from those freed-up courses to add a bit more depth in the AI core. It also shifts the set of available electives towards a more stats/ML/AI-centric group.
It's not a huge change from our CS curriculum, but it's one that lets AI/ML-interested undergrads create something that's more stats-heavy and deeper in AI than they would have been able to with the CS version. Keep in mind this is all still within the school of computer science.
This doesn't change things at the masters and Ph.D. level.
(Not to mention the notable lack of the utterly gigantic forest of higher-level discrete math concepts and programming language theory. Were I in a place to re-do an undergraduate career, this would have been very appealing to me relative to what CMU offered).