Maybe they meant in the sense of “untapped potential”, because so far a lot of the focus has been on increasing model capabilities, not necessarily performance/power budget.

Yes. Point is, it's untapped only because everyone is running in the race (even if out of curiosity), and there's just not enough people with means to tap into these side threads. For the past few years, there's been many interesting papers that circulated the industry, got recognized as worthwhile pursuits, and then dropped because running behind the Big Vendors had massively better ROI.