Given close to zero chances of a safe AI, I'm optimistic that AI is a much tougher problem and we are not significantly closer to the solution than e.g., in 60s when computer vision was a summer project.
There is a progress in certain domains (such as image recognition) but (outside specialized tasks) gigantic language models look like no more than impressive BS generators.
Yes, but after seeing this progress in the former, my time estimate of time remaining until the latter had just significantly shortened.