Google Trends is meant to show the popularity of search terms and topics. The whole of academic/research literature is too small to be a major factor in overall Google search interest -- even if machine learning was literally the only topic that AI-related journals and academia were talking about, it would not explain why search interest in the topic grew by 900% in a span of 3-5 years, to the point where, as a search term, it's more popular than artificial intelligence.

I don't think you give the author enough credit here. He makes it clear that he is writing to a general audience, an audience that he suspects does not know what AI is, nevermind that machine learning is a subset of AI. The author is guessing, rightly, that a general audience has now heard a lot about a thing called machine learning.

So the author says that this is likely because machine learning has become the trendy or popular way to describe a lot of artificial intelligence work, and that this is why he himself will be using machine learning and artificial intelligence in seemingly interchangeable ways.

The Google Trends data supports this idea. The Wikipedia pages for "Machine learning" and the history of machine learning support it too, in the way they include achievements of the other subfields (like computer vision).

What data or what evidence do you have that "machine learning" has become such a popularly-used (and searched for term) because more "actual machine learning (whatever that is) is being done? When you say "the main point is that it's not an alternative term for 'AI'", where is your evidence that the rest of the world, despite the original intent of the term and its taxonomy, hasn't decided to conflate "machine learning" with "AI"?

I don't mind you being a pedant. I myself hate it when people use "begs the question" divorced from its original meaning -- I'll even stop reading articles in the New York Times when I see a writer misuse it. But just because a linguist or philosopher tells a general audience that "begs the question" is now generally understood to be interpreted as "raise the question", that that person is a complete idiot in their field.

In terms of "whose understanding matters most?" -- I can't even guess what your line of thinking is here. You really think that scientific research and literature operate in a silo from the rest of the world? Even though the rest of the world is a massive factor in whether that scientific research gets funding? I work in academia -- and yes, I have no problem believing that academic research is influenced by what draws popular attention, and that there is nothing about the field of machine research or AI that makes them immune from such pressure, especially since it's possible to use machine learning and AI in the same kinds of articles and research context with no loss of understanding at all.

I'm curious what else in the article you think reflects that the OP "has no idea what he's talking about and is just making it up as he goes along." The OP asserts that he was "the technical leader for Google's social efforts (including photos)". You think he's lying about that? Or that that position must not have required any knowledge of machine learning/AI?