The growth of the the technology hasn't been exponential, it seems to grow under a diminishing marginal returns law, that is, the first 90% was "easy" to solve, but every bit of the remaining 10% seems increasingly and excruciatingly harder. If you're observing local behavior in the first 90% of the curve it might look like it could explode any time but unbeknownst to you, the behavior towards infinite is a actually a constant ceiling.
I'm not categorically denying it's exponential, I'm just saying it's very difficult to make assumptions based on observed local behavior.