Watching Sword Art Online is unironically the best way to understand AI and it's modern applications.
In the anime there's a theory for two types of AI, top down and bottom up. The former is what we have, it's like an advanced NPC, but it's still just an algorithm that processes existing data. It can't create anything new, it just generates associated data to give the illusion of something conscious.
Bottom up is a different story. A bottom up AI would be something that has access to all the data in the world but it learns, adapts and grows on it's own. That's also what would make "AGI" possible as if it can grow on it's own, then it's possible to grow outside of our existing understanding of the world.
But honestly it just seems like tech CEOs are manchildren that want to make a cyberpunk dystopia real for some fucking reason. It's so fake and gay.