[somesortofthing]

The difference here is that steam engines were "less powerful than a horse" in an easily quantifiable, easily diagnosable way. They produced fewer newtons of force. You could tell this was the case because your mechanism just wouldn't move when you wanted it to. Most new technologies followed this pattern, they quantifiably underperformed alternatives until the field matured. But AI doesn't act like a dumb human who's missing information or is inept at the task presented to them. It doesn't refuse to answer if you give it a question that's too hard for it or requires info that it doesn't have in the training dataset, it confidently makes stuff up and then covers up for the fact that it made stuff up by burying it in marketing copy and extraneous info such that you need to be an expert in the topic you're using AI for to even tell that it failed. Better AI models do help with this, but they simultaneously improve the AI's obfuscation abilities to the point where fatal flaws in its output are going to be even harder to catch than they are now with human review. It doesn't have the same risk calculus as a human, it doesn't care whether the marketing copy you're writing describes your product as wonderful and perfect or if it's providing you completely bogus legal advice that'll land you in jail for a decade if you follow it.

And this is all before we even bring up the topic of prompt injection, a problem so intrinsic to the technology that OpenAI doesn't even take bug reports on it because bug reports "are for problems that can be fixed".