What might be seen as exponential progress could actually be the accumulation of a few tremendous leaps, I believe. For instance, within the architecture realm, we've witnessed leaps such as:
Stacked neural networks (deep learning) / CNN / Transformer
From the application perspective, there are also areas that have seen significant progress:
AlphaGo (An application of reinforcement learning) / AlphaFold (An application for biological sequences) / ChatGPT (An application of Large Language Models / Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
You may pick different ideas. However, what I want to say is that these great advancements happened approximately once every two or three years. It may take some time before we witness another major leap.
In truth, the majority of research and development does not contribute to exponential progress. It's sad. However, this does not render such effort meaningless. Although it may seem as though there's too much competition within a narrow field, this may not necessarily be detrimental to humanity.
Stacked neural networks (deep learning) / CNN / Transformer
From the application perspective, there are also areas that have seen significant progress:
AlphaGo (An application of reinforcement learning) / AlphaFold (An application for biological sequences) / ChatGPT (An application of Large Language Models / Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
You may pick different ideas. However, what I want to say is that these great advancements happened approximately once every two or three years. It may take some time before we witness another major leap.
In truth, the majority of research and development does not contribute to exponential progress. It's sad. However, this does not render such effort meaningless. Although it may seem as though there's too much competition within a narrow field, this may not necessarily be detrimental to humanity.