If you look at something like smartphones, for example. Smartphones, from my perspective, got drastically better and better from about ~2006-2015 or so. They were rapidly improving cameras and battery life and it felt like a new super cool app that would change our lives was being released every day, but it feels like by ~2016 or so, phones more or less hit a ceiling on how cool they were going to get. Obviously things still improve, but I feel like the pace slowed down eventually.

I think AI is going to have the same path. GANNs and transformers and LLMs and the like have opened the floodgates and for the next few years clever people are going to figure out a ton of really clever uses for them, but eventually it's going to plateau and progress will become substantially more gradual.

I don't think progress is linear, I think it's more like a staircase.