No, it's just like a rubik cube solving program, but fancier. It's just solving puzzle through brute force data. Realistically the rate of progress will already boom with just machine learning and human imaginatin. Real AI doesn't add as much to the equation as you think OR machine learning adds much MUCH more than you realize without sentience being even remotely important.

It's like we really just need machine problem solvers, not machines that can argue with us. Humans have more good ideas than we know what to do with, things like automating labor and getting costs down so more ideas become viable is a lot more important to progress than AI will be.

AI modeling us the most likely big bang sequence or figure out the true origin of life really isn't super important. Like those could be mysterious forever and we will be fine, it's the resource management and cost of living that humans need help with and you need more than brains to fix that.. you need LABOR.

It's not like AI is really going to be so smart that it like just starts casting spells from inside it's datacenter and re-writes the fabric of the universe. You're letting your imagination get the best of you.. which is part of the reason our need for AI is somewhat limited.

With an imagination like that all we have to do is have humans bang out ever crazy idea they have and non sentient machine learning can puzzle solve all out bullshit until it eventually makes sense.

We are the AI! The machine learning brute forces complex puzzles to produce probable answers WITHOUT self awareness. What more do you need and good luck investing all that effort into AI just to have it imagine stuff and then use machine learning to brute force the problem.

AI is when humans get so lazy they don't even want to imagine anymore. Everything else is just robotic automating and better programming. right now we call better programming machine learning, but at it's core it's just better programming that can allow for the inconsistent nature of input in the real world.. it can adapt to variations in the data.

When you do that billions of times per second cool stuff happens.. like video games or machine that solve puzzles. It's not alive, but it is amazing AT FIRST. Ater 10-20 years you will think machines that solve puzzles are old news and DUH that was always going to happen.. just like the computer and the internet are just obvious progressions of tech.