The story is very clearly modeled to follow the exponential curve they show.

Like the drew the curve out into the shape they wanted, put some milestones on it, and then went to work imagining what would happen if it continued with a heavy dose of X-risk doomerism to keep it spicy.

It conveniently ignores all of the physical constraints around things like manufacturing GPUs and scaling training networks.

The true absurdity of this timeline is that everyone is behaving as perfectly rational players, which is absurd when you look at the current presidential administration, particularly in light of recent events.