To me, AI is most impactful in ways it was originally created for: combing through large data sets to make connections, even if that data set is a picture, or fifty of them. E.g., an ai was used to look at pictures taken with a microscope and it was able to pick out different structures/organisms without staining. Similar systems were also used to find discrete hints of far off galaxies than astronomers would struggle to detect without making their data quite noisy.

The big companies had nothing to do with these afaik, especially since the researchers that wrote the papers used machine learning in there methodology instead of the colloquial "AI", which I will always see as a misnomer until such time an AI is generally accepted to be someone, which I don't believe will happen anytime soon with our level of technology and failing biosphere.

Eh, maybe AI adjacent, and certainly not from the big ai companies.