> Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving.

I think the big problem is that the pace of improvement was UNBELIEVABLE for about 4 years, and it appears to have plateaued to almost nothing.

ChatGPT has barely improved in, what, 6 months or so.

They are driving costs down incredibly, which is not nothing.

But, here's the thing, they're not cutting costs because they have to. Google has deep enough pockets.

They're cutting costs because - at least with the current known paradigm - the cost is not worth it to make material improvements.

So unless there's a paradigm shift, we're not seeing MASSIVE improvements in output like we did in the previous years.

You could see costs go down to 1/100th over 3 years, seriously.

But they need to make money, so it's possible non of that will be passed on.

I think that even if it never improves, its current state is already pretty useful. I do think it's going to improve though I don't think AGI is going to happen any time soon.

I have no idea what this is called, but it feels like a lot of people assume that progress will continue at a linear pace for forever for things, when I think that generally progress is closer to a "staircase" shape. A new invention or discovery will lead to a lot of really cool new inventions and discoveries in a very short period of time, eventually people will exhaust the low-to-middle-hanging fruit, and progress kind of levels out.

I suspect it will be the same way with AI; I don't now if we've reached the top of our current plateau, but if not I think we're getting fairly close.

They are focused on reducing costs in order to survive. Pure and simple.

Alphabet / Google doesn’t have that issue. OAI and other money losing firms do.