[switchbak]

Presumably there's more efficient hardware foundations to perform these efficiently, and potential at the various abstraction layers for more efficiency. Obviously this is not unbounded - simple things would seem to have a physical limit to the potential improvement.

But if you think of the optimization space: different physical representations, different approaches (photo, quantum, etc), more parallelism - there's undoubtedly a lot of headroom even on the matrix multiplication side. I would imagine there's a lot left on the table when it comes to the abstractions we've built. Infinite? No, but lots of potential.

And what does a machine with a few orders of magnitude more power come up with? I'm not readily able to predict what something like that could create (maybe it's tapped out, but I doubt it).

It seems to come down to an article of faith (as referenced in the article) that there's a lot more potential to be extracted in our current exploitation paths. Which I think is probably reasonable.

Heck, even if a theoretical machine tops out at 3-5 orders of magnitude faster/more complex, I'm sure that could do some amazing things that look like magic to us.