I think a better question for AI is “is it more like a network effect, liquidity effect, or a biological/physical effect”?
Maybe just to be clear I think that kneejerk “I hate this AI trend, and prefer to believe this will end soon, all exponential growth ends eventually” is intellectually lazy, and dangerous for younger engineers/hackers, a group I hope can benefit from being on HN.
Bitcoin mining went through something like 13 10x growth periods, last I ran the numbers a few years ago. There are physical processes that do have very extended periods of doubling, and there are digital and financial processes that don’t show any signs of doing anything but continuing to keep growing over their multidecade lives. So, like I said, it’s worth thinking carefully, and risk mitigation for things like mental health, career decisions and investment decisions indicates we should be cautious assessing new dynamics.
Or Roman trade volume before the Fall of Rome.
Not to mention what you describe is not technological improvement but increase in data or money flows, not the same.
But I don’t that think it’s quite so obvious that model quality / growth / usefulness is definitively and obviously not more like data or money flows than it is like some other process.