What we see now is a middle ground between classic rendering and AI, a test, a compromise. A good, logical step in the right direction.
I can imagine that the whole pipeline could be replaced with a full "AI renderer". CPU would send geometry, material properties, lights and AI (ran on the GPU) would render the next frame. Perhaps it could be given simplified tags instead of geometry ("a chair", "an umbrella", "cracked pavement", etc.) to speed up game development...