Comment by achierius

Overall in the economy, no, rate is discoveries is not going to drop off.

But in any specific industry or area? You often get a bunch of big discoveries, and then there is a long period of no important discoveries, because we've figured out the main aspects of that technological paradigm. The technology becomes commoditized and standard.

And that's the trillion dollar question with AI right now -- will we soon exhaust the potential of the current LLM paradigm? And we'll just have 20 or 30 years of figuring out mainly how to make LLMs cheaper and how integrate them into business processes, before somebody comes up with another fundamental breakthrough?

Or are we only 10% of the way in developing the current LLM paradigm? Where a decade from now models virtually never make mistakes and are smarter than basically any tenured faculty member in their field?

We have no reason to expect anything of the 'rate of discoveries' because that is completely independent of anything to do with productionizing them.

For all we know it becomes negative because all the people who understood how to train a trillion parameter model get killed by an asteroid during a conference.