The thing about "hyping AI way beyond its capabilities" is that the future capabilities will no doubt be greater than the current ones so they may just be talking about the future a bit.
There's a bit of a tipping point in usefulness between AI being a bit worse than humans and a bit better, like for mathematical theorems that's probably happened where being not very good was kind of useless and just recently they are proving lots of things. That will probably gradually happen in other fields creating a lot of economic value.
- AI may speed up on improvements and be a singularity moment, truly a new industrial revolution.
- AI may have only incremental improvements in the next few decades with diminishing returns.
- AI improvements may plateau and fizzle out.
All those are possible scenarios, and if you dig you may find evidence and historical precedence for all of those. I don't think making wild bets that can tank the whole economy based on a FOMO-fueled prediction that everything will work out in a best-case scenario is healthy.
I see your point but there's been a Moore's law like trend in compute/dollar that's progressed steadily for about a century and has a very high probability of continuing. How that maps into AI products is a bit uncertain but there's definitely a trend in that direction.
As an example of the predictability, Hand Moravec wrote quite a well argued paper in 1989 predicting human level hardware capabilities would be available in inexpensive machines around the mid 2020s which I think was fairly spot on. He also argued once those capabilities were there, software guys would figure things to use if for.
The thing about "hyping AI way beyond its capabilities" is that the future capabilities will no doubt be greater than the current ones so they may just be talking about the future a bit.
There's a bit of a tipping point in usefulness between AI being a bit worse than humans and a bit better, like for mathematical theorems that's probably happened where being not very good was kind of useless and just recently they are proving lots of things. That will probably gradually happen in other fields creating a lot of economic value.