... and, must be said a plethora of largely unsung, small, unknown "labs", outfits, "researchers" and the like. There is a long tail of smart people having at this. I guess, sheer compute aside, I think much progress - or, at least, important pieces thereof, will come from there.-

There are some niche research areas where bog standard machine learning algorithms make miracles. LLM is just the poster child. AI/ML is a much larger and wider research area.