I don't understand this deliberately pessimistic perspective I keep seeing around AI development that stubbornly ignores every other technological development in history. Even just considering the singular transformer architecture, we're still seeing significant and novel improvement. In just a couple years we've watched the technology go from basic predictive text to high quality image and even video generation, now to real time robotics control.

The transformer architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible. The notion that the basic technology staying the same is an indication of stagnation is as ridiculous as if you said the same of transistors half a century ago. Most of the improvement we see in the near future will be through recursive and multi-modal applications, meta-architechtural developments that don't require the core technology to change at all.