[IshKebab]

How do you know though? People thought ANNs and perceptrons were basically useless until pretty much around the time of AlexNet and while there were some architectural improvements (CNNs, transformers), the biggest thing that changed was that we simply threw more compute at it.

It's definitely too early to declare that more compute won't make a difference.

[noosphr]

It was data. Alexnet worked because imagenet existed. It took less than a year between the dataset becoming public and the first version of Alexnet being trained.