...you do realize that a year or two into the earliest investigations into nuclear reactions what you would have measured was less energy emission than a match being lit, right?

The question is, "Can you create a chain reaction that grows?", and the answer is unclear right now with AI, but it's hard to say with any confidence that the answer is "no". Most experts five years ago would have confidently declared that passing the Turing test was decades to centuries away, if it ever happened, but it turned out to just require beefing up an architecture that was already around and spending some serious cash. I have similarly low faith that the experts today have a good sense that e.g. you can't train an LLM to do meaningful LLM research. Once that's possible, the sky is the limit, and there's really no predicting what these systems could or could not do.