I have doubts about that. You don't need AI (understood as the current LLMs) to make a powerful chess engine, or computer vision or anything that reacts faster and better than a human. We've had those forever.

A good word predictor happens to be good with closed systems with very defined rules for which a huge training corpus exists and we are suddendly freaking out about how it's gonna become so much better than us at everything that we are basically obsolete.

When in doubt about where AI stands, ask it to create a poem, a joke or a riddle. And see how little actual intelligence it has.