One of the most difficult problems that no one had been able to solve was the protein folding problem. It is immensely important in understanding diseases, treating diseases, making cures for diseases, and diagnosing diseases. In 2023 AI solved this and then calculated how the billion+ proteins known to man are folded and then shared that with the world in an open source database. They won the Nobel prize for this and it is considered the single greatest development in medicine, ever. That was two years ago.
The idea that AI is simply a program following rules that a programmer gave it is absurd. No programmer knew how to solve this problem.
It took Deep Mind about 16 months to solve this, however, by the end their computer was operating more than 100x faster than it was the year earlier. Problems that two years earlier took them four months to solve they could now solve in a matter of seconds, or minutes at the most.
This is where AI was two years ago. This is not college graduate level or Phd level, it is Nobel prize level.