AI made very little progress for 40 years from the 70’s, basically just some basic pattern recognition like OCR in the 80’s.
Up until recently AI development has been extremely underwhelming, especially compared to what we hoped back in the 80’s.
Although results are pretty impressive, autonomous cars are still a hard nut to crack.
Most impressive IMO are the recent LLMs (Large Language Model), but these results are very recent, compared to the many decades research has been done to develop better AI.
Honestly an AI beating a human at chess is not that impressive AI research IMO, as it’s an extremely narrow task, you can basically just throw computational power at. Still for many years that was the most impressive AI achievement.