I'm seriously jealous of the people getting paid to work on this. Sounds great fun and must be incredibly satisfying to move the state of the art forward like that.
I found the work environment to be more important than the subject when it comes to work satisfaction. If you are working on a world changing subject with a team of assholes, you are going to have a bad time, some people really have a skill for sucking the fun out of everything, and office politics are everywhere, especially on world changing subjects.
On the other hand, you can have a most boring subject, say pushing customer data to a database, and have the time of your life: friendly team, well designed architecture, time for experimentation and sharing of knowledge, etc... I have come to appreciate the beauty of a simple thing that just works. It is so rare, maybe even more rare than scientific breakthroughs.
Now, you can also have an awesome work environment and an awesome subject, it is like hitting the jackpot... and a good reason to be envious.
Pretty much all the top AI labs are both intensely competitive and collaborative. They consist of many former IMO and IOI medalists. They don't believe in remote work, either. Even if you work at Google DeepMind, you really need to be in London for this project.
It looks like "jealous" is more being afraid of losing something you have (most commonly e.g. a spouse's affection) to someone else, whereas "envious" is wanting what someone else has?
(/s)
I guess I should have pursued a PhD when I was younger.