Those aren't really equivalent situations though. Take moon landings, for example: the most obvious problem there is that it was ridiculously expensive for no r

Those aren't really equivalent situations though. Take moon landings, for example: the most obvious problem there is that it was ridiculously expensive for no real commercial gain. It was basically a dick waving contest for the government, so while there were steady improvements in space tech after, there was no reason to keep improving at moon landings specifically, or at least no commercially compelling reason. Now, if the original moon landings had already been reasonably priced, and there was a ton of super rare resources on the moon, different story. In contrast, training machine learning models like this, while not exactly cheap, is clearly cheap-er by a few orders of magnitude. And there's obvious commercial application: near-instant art in an absurd variety of styles, that can be created by anyone, no actual art skill required. That means there's the incentive and necessary resources to fund further improvements, and at least at the moment, there doesn't seem to be an obvious technological 'wall' that we won't be able to get past (though of course the better it gets and the fewer flaws there are, the less room there is for further improvement).