LLMs have hit a plateau & we'll probably meander around on it for the forseeable future

I’ve got bad news.
The AI cycle is over—for now.

I’ve been an unapologetic AI maximalist since the first time I tricked GPT-4 into writing a working Python back-test for a volatility strategy back in early 2023. I’m still convinced it will take the wider economy years—maybe…

— Adam Butler (@GestaltU) August 10, 2025

From further down in the tweet: “What comes next is not the next spectacular demo but the quiet absorption of today’s tools into the 80 percent of the economy that still runs on Excel and email.... “

Before that: “For [super-intelligence] we need either an architectural miracle (unforecastable by definition) or a civil-engineering miracle (a decade-long sprint to build nuclear plants and 2-nanometer fabs).” Even the civil-engineering miracle won’t get us there. As for the architectural miracle, we don’t need a miracle. We need inventive research on new technologies, like the neuro-symbolic technology that Gary Marcus is also talking about, but also something like the “associative drift engine” ChatGPT mentioned in a recent conversation: From Mirror Recognition to Low-Bandwidth Memory.