> I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. Or CPU frequencies in the 1990's. Also we spent quite a few decades at t

> I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. Or CPU frequencies in the 1990's. Also we spent quite a few decades at the end of the 19th century thinking that physics was finished. I'm not sure that explaining it as an "S curve" is really the right metaphor either, though. You get the "exponential" growth effect when there's a specific technology invented that "just needs to be applied", and the application tricks tend to fall out quickly. For sure generative AI is on that curve right now, with everyone big enough to afford a datacenter training models like there's no tomorrow and feeding a community of a million startups trying to deploy those models. But nothing about this is modeled correctly as an "exponential", except in the somewhat trivial sense of "the community of innovators grows like a disease as everyone hops on board". Sure, the petri dish ends up saturated pretty quickly and growth levels off, but that's not really saying much about the problem.