Nit: I don’t have a lot of confidence that category theory will be useful here. Category theorists spend more time re-proving existing mathematics than doing anything novel. As evidenced by the Wikipedia article for Applied category theory being bereft of real-life examples.
But I agree, objective driven AI (reinforcement learning) has shown much more promise. It needs more work on neural net architectures and data efficiency, though, which are improvements that usually come from traditional supervised learning.