I feel like algorithmic/architectural breakthroughs are still the area that will show the most wins. The thing is that insights/breakthroughs of that sort that tend to be highly portable. As Meta showed, you can just pay people 10 million to come tell you what they're doing over there at that other place.

inb4 "then why do Meta's models still suck?"

Hasn't this been proven true, many times now? Just look at the difference between ChatGPT 3 and 3.5, for example (which used the same dataset). That, and all the top performing models have large gains from thinking, using the exact same weights.

And, all the new research around self learning architectures has nothing to do with the datasets.