You can also argue that even the leaps we've managed to make in machine learning (a phrase I prefer over 'AI' not least because it includes the reminder-word 'm

You can also argue that even the leaps we've managed to make in machine learning (a phrase I prefer over 'AI' not least because it includes the reminder-word 'machine') are mostly quantitative rather than qualitative leaps. Almost anything you can think of that's 'better' lately seems to be mostly thanks to 'more' -- more data collected in one place available for training/processing (thanks to large centralized surveillance companies), and the ability to process more data faster (thanks to faster hardware, and more of it, owned by those selfsame large centralized surveillance companies). We've seen a lot of optimizations and interesting research within the existing paradigm but we haven't seen a serious qualitative breakthrough the likes of which would justify this kind of hype.