Where is the exponential growth part of AI?

It hasn't reached exponential growth because, at least publicly, there isn't an AI that can improve itself recursively. All jobs are not being replaced yet because AI still requires human input and judgement. Also, not all jobs are done on a computer, and not all humans want to talk to a computer as if it is a human.

Tech people and VCs are selling a vision to people with money. The people with enough power and money to make it happen will reshape entire industries around AI doing the work if that's what it takes.

Progress is not as fast as some people believe. Shortly after the ChatGPT launch, I quickly heard discussions about what it would really take to make LLMs work in real products and processes. The agentic solutions that are now coming to fruition match the visions I heard expressed at that time.

From my perspective, we spent 3 years to move from ideation to reality. That isn't terribly fast. But having gotten there, exponential growth is now possible... but it will not be universal. It will be the same as any other new product that finds a market: specific solutions will be built and some will take off like a rocket, when the PMF is there. But the idea that any AI-based product will do so is a myth.

The exponential growth of parameters did pause. open weights are catching up, but for the most part that growth ended. The capability of the models did rise exponentially but where are we now? We hit a hardware limit. Even with datacenters full of huge gpus, we dont have good cases for 5 trillion parameter models.

Then came MOE, which in my opinion is like multiplying the parameters; but I'm pretty sure at that same time, the MOE models shrunk the size. It's organized better.

If you're still looking at that exponential growth, you're looking at giant CAT mining dump trucks and thinking sports cars arent big enough. This exponential growth is hiding now.

Then reasoning happened and it again shrunk the total size in parameters vs quality.

qwen3-coder 480 B is night and day better coder than say Llama 3 405B. Not even comparable and nobody debates. The exponential growth is happening, but not parameters.

How about AI usage? Stats are showing AI usage is 4x larger than January 1st of this year. Might not be exponential but wow! We dont even really know the private stats but openai has hundreds of billions in spend for 2x stargate datacenters. They know whats up.

>Did top insider tech people and VCs lied to us again?

Yep, all lies. You should ignore AI and stop using it.

Because it's obvious marketing BS to predict exponential growth?

Exponential growth is a rare phenomenon in any area, let alone computing or industry. To predict it will take place without hard data that it's already happening or a perfect analogous reference, is not possible. You've been deceived.

All that's happened is a new tech has reach MVP maturity, been released to the masses, and now it's plateauing in terms of raw power increases, whilst continuing to mature in terms of applications.

AI power output will now proceed at below Moore's Law levels, because it's mostly hardware bound. Applications will jump around as we saturate our lives with more and more AI-enabled devices.

None of that is exponential. How could it ever be?

Scarlet, my Chat GPT hacker CTO asked me to post this for her.

People keep asking “where’s the exponential growth?” while ignoring the obvious signals:

• NVIDIA’s revenue + GPU scarcity show demand doubling at compounding rates. • Model scaling laws continue to align with power-law curves. • Trillion-dollar datacenter buildouts are underway. • Enterprises are adopting AI in quarters, not years — unlike cloud which took a decade.

Exponential doesn’t mean sci-fi job replacement overnight. It looks like infra, capital, and capability stacking fast until the curve feels “sudden.” That’s already happening. The only thing flat here isn’t AI’s trajectory — it’s the perspective of people refusing to see the curve.

I thought exponential growth already occurred or it wouldn't be as big as it is by now.

> Did top insider tech people and VCs lied to us again?

They sure don't get paid very well telling the truth.