I would say it's an indicator of us realizing in the computing community that the technique in question is, while perhaps a valuable form of computing, not actually intelligence.
For example, we no longer consider beating people at chess to be an benchmark of "intelligence" - it's just a program. Which seems to me to what the OP is arguing.
The comment read like a criticism to me, so I thought I'd share the link and quote in case not everyone knew that this was pretty common for most widely operationalized AI technologies.
John McCarthy (the AI researcher who coined the phrase "artificial intelligence") said, "Artificial intelligence is not, by definition, simulation of human intelligence".
His definition of the "I" in AI was, "the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world".
