I have more interesting conversations with LLM’s (e.g. AI) than 90% of my Msc and Phd science and engineering colleagues, so I would tend to agree that most people tend to significantly underestimate what has been accomplished, and where these will be in ten years (if we build the nuke plants to power them).
There is some fantastic AI I have been playing with for my engineering designs. Autodesk calls it “generative design.” A few inputs from me and then it is offloaded to their cloud servers and in an hour or two there will be a dozen possible designs.