A lot of AI optimist views are driven more by Moore's law like advances in the hardware rather than LLM algorithms being that special. Indeed the algorithms need to change really so future AIs can think and learn rather than just be pretrained. If you read Moravec's paper written in 1989 predicting human level AI progress around now (mid 2020s) there's nothing about LLMs or specific algorithms - it's all Moore's law type stuff. But it's proved pretty accurate.