I have worked on out of sample problems, and AI absolutely struggles, but it dramatically accelerates the research process. Testing ideas is cheap, support tools are quick to write, and the LLM itself is a tremendous research tool itself.

More generally, I do think LLMs grant 10x+ performance for most common work: most of what people do manually is in the training data (which is why there's so much of it in the first place.) 10x+ in those domains can in theory free up more brain space to solve the problems you're talking about.

My advice to you is to tone down the cynicism, and see how it could help you. I'll admit, AI makes me incredibly anxious about my future, but it's still fun to use.