Scientific breakthroughs happen, but they're notoriously difficult to make happen on command or on a schedule. Taking them for granted or as inevitable seems quite detached from reality.
True, but given how many breakthroughs we had in AI recently, for text, sound, images and video the odds of new breakthroughs happening are probably higher than otherwise.
We have no idea how many of them we need till AGI or at least replacing software engineers though.
That's mostly just a few discoveries finding multiple applications. That's fairly common after a large breakthrough, and what you see is typically a flurry of activity and then things die down as the breakthrough gets figured out.
It's "a few discoveries finding multiple applications" plus throwing as much data and compute as possible at those applications, a process that seems to be increasingly struggling uphill in the last year or so.
