What if I were to tell you that Physics included more than Theoretical Particles? Are experimental Physicist just Engineers? Are String Theorists just Mathematicians? Is John von Neumann not a Physicist because he also worked with Computers? Awful lot of nit-picking in this thread.
These are Mathematics/CS techniques and nothing whatever to do with core Theoretical/Experimental Physics notwithstanding that they may have been inspired from Physics. There are plenty of Physics Researchers toiling away at real hard problems of the Physical World and instead of recognizing them the Committee has gone with "market fads" which themselves were only realizable due to Hardware advances at scale over the past decade. With this award they have disheartened and demotivated all true Physics Researchers which is a huge disservice to the Hard Science Community.
This is not to say that AI/ML researchers/community are not worthy of recognition. But they should not be folded under Physics rather a new category should have been created and they then awarded under it.