alt Hacker NewsAI, the way you are describing it, has not been invented yet. It is a fiction.
What is called "AI" today is an extremely vague marketing term being applied to various software technologies which are only dangerous because humans are dangerous. Nuclear & chemical weapons are also "very scary" but only because the humans who might decide to use them in fits of insanity are scary.
I'm not in the slightest bit uneasy about "AI" itself right now, because as I said, the AI of Sci-Fi has not yet been invented…and seems unlikely to in any of our lifetimes. (Not throwing shade on clever researchers. We also don't have working FTL travel, though plenty of scientists speculate on how such an engine might be built.)
"It's just marketing" is just the "denial" stage wearing a flimsy disguise.
Even LLMs of today routinely do the kind of tasks that would have "required human intelligence" a few years prior. The gap between "what humans can do" and "what frontier AIs can do" is shrinking every month.
What makes you think that what remains of that gap can't be closed in a series of incremental upgrades? Just 4 years have passed since the first ChatGPT. There are a lot of incremental upgrades left in "any of our lifetimes".