Most people don't realize this, but almost all research works that way. Only the media spins research as breakthrough-based, because that way it is easier to se

Most people don't realize this, but almost all research works that way. Only the media spins research as breakthrough-based, because that way it is easier to sell stories. But almost everything is incremental/iterative. Even the transformer architecture, which in some way can be seen as the most significant architectural advancement in AI in the past years, was a pretty small, incremental step when it came out. Only with a lot of further work building on top of that did it become what we see today. The problem is that science-journalists vastly outnumber scientists producing these incremental steps, so instead of reporting on topics when improvements actually accumulated to a big advancement, every step along the way gets its own article with tons of unnecessary commentary heralding its features.