The AI research space is still a pretty green field. Right now you can basically take any random paper and combine it with another random paper and you will be

The AI research space is still a pretty green field. Right now you can basically take any random paper and combine it with another random paper and you will be able to find a use case where that succeeds and write a new paper about it. More experienced researchers will, of course, have a better intuition/knowledge of what techniques to combine to get more impressive results. As long as it stays like that (and by opening up new sub-areas, it could stay like that for quite some while), adding more somewhat qualified people to the field results in all the useful combinations being discovered faster and thus exposing new potential starting points. Probably no exponential growth in the strict sense, but quadratic growth isn't bad either.