AI historically has been the entire field of making machines think, or behave as if they think, more like biological models (not even exclusively humans.)
The far-off-end-goal wasn’t even usually what we now call AGI, but “strong AI” (mirroring the human brain on a process level) or “human-level intelligence” (mirroring it on a capability/external behavior level), while the current distant horizons are “AGI” (which is basically human-scope but neutral on level) and “superintelligence” (AGI and beyond human level).
Compiler optimization? AI. Map routing? AI. SQL query optimizer? AI.
I can't find it right now, but there used to be somewhere on the sqlite.org website that describes its query optimizer as an AI. Classically speaking, that's 100% correct.
Obviously there was always in people's minds the idea of AI being AGI; the course also covered Searle's Chinese Room argument and so on, "strong AI" vs "weak AI" and so on. But the nuts and bolts of artificial intelligence research was nowhere near anything like an AGI.