I think it's not really much of "hitting a ceiling", but more like plateauing, with growth and improvement slowed down so much that it seems to stagnate. It's

I think it's not really much of "hitting a ceiling", but more like plateauing, with growth and improvement slowed down so much that it seems to stagnate. It's all relative. In computing we're used to Moore's law driving most of the innovation (including this AI boom, which was at least partially due to availability of high powered GPUs), if improvements become less "exponential" and more "linear" it would feel like stagnation. Right now in AI, we're talking about leaps of capabilities in months. When improvements come along every other decade, it's not "hitting a ceiling" but effectively it's plateauing and stagnating compared to this period of high growth. For example, Chinese models are said to be roughly 6 months behind. If this remains constant and frontier AI models gets a break through every couple years, this isn't "hitting a ceiling" but it would erode away the competitive edge they have over the Chinese models.