Or scales sub-linearly with hardware. When you're in the rising portion of an S-curve[1] you can't tell how much longer it will go on before plateauing.

A lot of this resembles post-war futurism that assumed we would all be flying around in spaceships and personal flying cars within a decade. Unfortunately the rapid pace of transportation innovation slowed due to physical and cost constraints and we've made little progress (beyond cost optimization) since.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

The fact that it scales sub linearly with hardware is well known and in fact foundational to the scaling laws on which modern LLMs are built, ie performance scales remarkably closely to log(compute+data), over many orders of magnitude.