Comment by jcims

One rather pedestrian factor that could be at play is that 'AI' seems to be quite good at optimization. Eg the Anthropic Scion project to improve throughput of CI/CD. (https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro...)

This combined with ability to massively scale experiments for even (or maybe particularly) the most mundane performance tweaks might just be making the process of improving AI more efficient.