Future proofing for Apple Intelligence?

I am looking to upgrade my intel macbook to a M2 or M3 macbook air. I only use it for taking notes, emails, powerpoint presentations, reading PDFs, and occasionally some light programming (I only do high performance stuff on the cloud). So I am content with just 8GB of RAM and 256GB of memory since I never exceed those and often use cloud storage. I like the AI stuff that is coming out for Apple and definitely see how it can speed up my overall workflow. But I am wondering if it would be sufficient to just stick with the M2 base model?