I think he got it backwards. Whisper, incredible things chatbots can do with machine translation and controlled text generation, unbelievably useful code-generation capabilities (if enjoyed responsibly), new heights in general and scientific question answering, etc. AI as a set of tools is just great already, and users have access to it at a very low cost because these people passionately believe in weirdly improbable scenarious and their belief is infectious enough for some other people to give them enough money for capex and for yet other people to work 996 if not worse to push their models forward.

To put it another way, there were many talented people and lots of compute already before the AI craze really took off in early 2020s, and tell me, what magical things were they doing instead?