And his comments about ANNs in general were wrong. ANNs were never "fancy search engines". You can train them to be a fancy search engine if you want, but you can also train them to do many other things.

Shock horror: different subfields have different terminology.

I mean it's not really different terminology, matrices are order 2 tensors so we're all in agreement that they're technically doing math on tensors. It's just weird to call it tensors when you exclusively operate on matrices.

Headcanon: tensor just sounded cooler - and it is cooler - when Tensorflow was invented, and it's stuck around.

You are probably right. I blame the Matrix movies for this: they made matrix sound cool for a while, and then oversaturation lead to it being less cool.

Hah yes I almost wrote that as well. I think it might be exactly that.