The plateau doesn't have to be perfectly flat, but it's not a straight line upward anymore either (kind of like our work on transistors, where we've kind of hit the bounds of speed in clock cycles but are improving on miniaturization and power efficiency)
Very true, the sharp increase in difficulty (as measured by human passrate plummeting from 1->2 and again from 2->3) gives an even more stark view of AI capabilities over time.
if true then LLM related AI (post-post AI winter AI?) is probably one of the fastest inception-to-plateau tech sectors to have ever existed.
We're still improving transistors on a somewhat routine basis.