[xiasongh]

There's key parts left out of that quote that changes the tone quite a bit. Here is the full one

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." - Donald Knuth

[Animats]

Knuth was writing in an era when scientific programs tended to be dominated by inner loops. There was an input part, a compute part that did some number-crunching, and an output part. Only performance in the compute part mattered.

Many programs today have no inner loop. Compilers were the first important programs that didn't. Most interactive programs have an outer loop processing events, rather than an inner compute loop.

Note that "AI" programs are much more like the scientific problems of Knuth's era. All the compute is in tight loops wrangling matrices.