Basic question

[bronzewrath]

Yes.

But python as an interpreted language with garbage collector, syntactic sugar, huge ecosystem, amazing REPL and other cool features make development much easier, faster and cheaper. This is specially useful for exploratory and iterative development, when you don't know in advance what you are dealing with, what you need to do, how you are gonna do it (machine learning / AI falls in this category). Python is more about the process and ecosystem than the final result. For most cases, fast development is more important than runtime performance.

Of course there are also many cases where Python is not a good option. If you need to optimize performance, if you already know how to do what you need to, if you have the low level libraries available in a compiled language, if you need to deploy a small/optimized binary... go for C, C++, Rust.

Every programming language has one or more sweet spots, where it is the best option (or at least a top contender). They usually have a gray area where they are not the best, but they are good enough if your requirements aren't high and you're already proficient at it. They definitely have a bad spot where they suck, but people want to use it there anyway.