There is a point between AI (chatgpt, stable diffusion) and regular software based controllers (PID on an 8bit microcontroller).

This point is Machine Learning and for literature it may be indistinguishable from AI but can be just a Linear Regression / Random Forest / Basic Neural Network / Transformer implemented in 1000 lines of C or Python. The main difference in my opinion is the options we have to train those models [0] and be confident we can trim it enough to fit on the target device / get upgrades.

I think what the author should refer to is this standardized way of collecting data, running the models and shipping the weights for low power inference.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery-ml/docs/reference/standard...