As you said, AI and physics are inherently not really parallelizable while rendering is. AI and physics from the Athlon 64/Pentium 4 era (e.g. Half-Life 2, Crysis) are similar to what we get now, while visual quality greatly improved (better textures, more detailed objects, longer visibility range).
In terms of physics usually the issue is if you have a rich physics envrionment it gets more fragile: it's easier for players to break it, intentionally or unintentionally. I've played some games with physics systems far in advance in terms of number of objects than could be achieved previously and they are all pretty much just 'buggy', not necessarily in terms of coding quality, just in terms of how rigid body physics is really prone to creating edge cases which create massive forces, velocities, and/or accelerations from apparently benign arrangements of objects.
here's a video of hl2 devs reacting to a speedrun of the game using many exploits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g
kind of a long video, but there's a lot of interesting commentary on how much work it was to make the physics puzzles robust against unexpected player actions.