This seems a not too uncommon experience among CS people where machine learning loses its interest once they understand the magic
The electric motor had been invented (by Faraday), but it couldn't do any useful work and had to sit in a pool of mercury to function. Electric lighting had been invented, but the filaments were dim and burned out too quickly to be practical. There was no way to generate or distribute electricity at scale. To most people, electricity looked like a toy (and a terrifying toy at that). It would take decades of invention and refinement to get to the point where electricity was useful, reliable, and ubiquitous. But the seeds for doing so were there in 1850.
So when Sundar Pichai says AI is more profound than electricity, it's possible he's right. It's just that we're still in its 1850, so we can't see it yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity#Cultural_perceptio...
There was no ML in 1850, and the word "tensor" was invented in 1846. No biochemistry, no genetics, no quantum mechanics.
You can make a claim that "This might be revolutionary! It's just too early to tell." about literally anything.
But I would not say that makes it uninteresting. Nor does it make it irrelevant from a business perspective. There are still lots of beneficial ways to use ML, and lots of different angles from which to derive intellectual satisfaction. I suppose if someone went into the field expecting I Robot type stuff, they might be disappointed, but it's hard to imagine someone with a CS background having such unrealistic expectations of what ML actually is.
Maybe. I went into my program with no preconceived ideas that there was 'magic' happening here. What I got out of it was a real curiosity about how humans think and how that may not be a magical as we think either.
Long-term I cannot see AI being anything but the paradigm-smashing artifact it's sold as. But progress is (relatively) slow on a human scale, so we find incremental progress ultimately lackluster.
If you take it through that lens it becomes more reasonable and you find yourself less skeptical that, just as we have no flying cars, we have no AGI or that all work has been replaced.