The heavy lifting of AI is done by GPUs that are not running Python. But yes, a lot of orchestration and glue work is done by Python. Python can be a decent glue language and it has its place. But if the core/high performance logic of inference and training was written in Python then we wouldn't have today's AI. I imagine there are other languages in the mix.

Python is also the choice of non-programmers for simple work. Nothing wrong with that. But I wouldn't want e.g. my car's ABS system to be programmed in Python (or my browser or my OS or many other examples).

Your car's ABS is probably programmed in something more error-prone than Python, like C or the assembly language of whatever microcontroller runs it.

This gets more terrifying if you've ever experienced spurious ABS activation. It's the third scariest thing that's happened to me in a vehicle.