[notahacker]

There are more ideas to try, but this doesn't necessarily mean they're better ones or that we're bound to come up with them. Training transformers on corpuses of human text has worked extremely well at enabling AIs to generate continuations which are consistent with human text including really useful human text like code, but the limit might be the human text rather than the transformer architecture...

The ROI for cornering the nail market seems like it could have been big. The ROI for making something significantly more efficient than a ICE would have been very high for most of the last century and technology that is better in many respects than ICEs does now exist, but it took us roughly a century to get there. The ROI for coming up with something that's better than the ~1% annual efficiency improvement on turbofans would be extremely high, but we don't know what that is (probably some sort of propfan, but that idea's over 50 years old...)