This is actually a well-known phenomenon in ML, called "The Bitter Lesson".

> One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.

The full essay is worth a read, it's pretty short http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html