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As Napoleon once said, quantity has a quality all its own.
My private project is a graphics thing for ricing. To get what I wanted, I would have had to become proficient in desktop compositing, OpenGL, wayland, and several disciplines around graphics and rendering. Then I would have had to write several thousand lines of fairly finicky boilerplate, including several false starts and bad assumptions.
If I were retired and had the time and the energy, I could do that. In practice, though, switching from 5% ideas 95% grind to 60% ideas 30% reading 10% grind means that it’s fun and I’m a good chunk of the way there after maybe three good evenings of work. Without AI that just wouldn’t have happened and it would go into the bin of ‘someday’.
For my startup, again, AI is not a superintelligence but it sirfaces good papers, explains the maths when I get stuck, implements diagnostics in minutes that would take me hours. It’s not like having a Nobel winner in my pocket, it’s like having a textbook that can talk to me and a bunch of PhD students on Speed. Very senior people in very serious organisations are using it for proof of concepts and your projects.
TLDR: no individual thing it does is truly revolutionary except maybe the maths from my perspective, but I find the ease and quality and speed with which it does it is revolutionary in aggregate.
That just proves the point though. That also holds true for most things in the industrial world. The gap for me stems not from it providing no value, but how it differentiates itself from everything else that achieves the same thing in its respective domain. There’s one of two categories the tech falls into:
AI making existing technologies easier to use and increase productivity.
AI inventing new tools, technologies, methods, routines and research.
The problem I have with so many people who love to talk up the AI ladder is they use 1 as a way to argue for 2. 1 has been the whole long read of technological and economic progress since humanity has existed. There’s nothing “new” about that. I’m glad in your case it’s lowered the barrier to entry for you, but I don’t see that as a strongly given “new inroad” for the tech itself.
I think that's a broadly artificial separation. In my opinion the vast majority of new tools / technologies / methods / routines / research come from some combination of:
I have observed AI doing (2) and it makes (1) and (3) considerably easier.
If my project works it will be an entirely new way of doing desktops, and I guess it was my idea not the AI's, which is maybe what you mean? But I got a lot of the techniques from another area and 90% of the design is the AI's suggestion and uses techniques I'd never heard of, so it's still more complicated. I'm quite happy for the top-level what to stay my job and leave the how to the machine, of course.
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