All you need is... (r)evolution!?

This is just an opinion of what I experience and am witnessing, but looking at how LLMs scale feels like I've seen it before: with CPUs trying to outrun Moore's Law and break the rules of physics. Heat, power leakage, and diminishing returns made it increasingly expensive to squeeze out even small gains in clock speed. The GHz race shifted because it had to. For LLMs, more compute, more data, more parameters, and everything just keeps getting better? That curve seems to hit a ceiling and innovation needs to succeed the scaling race now. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. What learnings can we make from history to "predict" a potential future? History In the early 2000s, CPUs ran into a wall, a very physical one ^^ So makers adapted. Instead of crunching every single watt out of a single core, multi-cores became common. Athlon 64 x2, Pentium D, PS3 with its heavy Cell approach. From linear to parallel. From sequential to multi-threaded (and funny race conditions ;). Talks of distributed systems, SIMD/MIMD and new benchmarking spawned into what we have today. We still use CPUs, but differently. We still have Memory, but think about Cache, RAM, GPU or Unified. Same same, but different. Innovation because of limitation. Present I feel something similar is about to happen to gen AI. Yes, there are improvements in different areas, some in scaling, some optimisation, some performance, but the slope is becoming slippery. The last 12 months went from "Opus 4.5 is the pinnacle" to "What the hell is wrong with Claude?". The perfect (business) storm of scaling execution! But the low-hanging fruits have been eaten and the crops don't grow as fast anymore. Costs rise quickly, latency becomes a constraint, and even large context windows feel more like extensions than breakthroughs. What remains is more incremental, more expensive, and more complex. You could argue the whole venture of "agents" is the same multi-core experience repeating itself. A different kind of orch