Based upon this article, I am also not sure what is really new here. Probabilistic AI has been around since the 1980s (see Judea Pearl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_Pearl).
There's a lot of new interest in probabilistic programming languages, which is what Noah et. al. have developed. See http://probabilistic-programming.org/wiki/NIPS*2008_Workshop for a workshop from about a year ago that explored the space. Probabilistic programming languages enable you to express concepts such as recursion and universal quantification in a way that Pearl's graphs don't easily allow.
