Yes... The field lacks the HOLY GRAIL (long-horizon problems). But we don't need a mouse-brain to sort spam emails. The Hail Mary 2B+ parameter models and above are still niche uses of these algorithms (too heavy to run practically). There is plenty of room for clever and small models running on limited hardware and datasets to solve useful problems and nothing more.

Models that change size as needed have been experimented with, but they are either too inefficient or difficult to optimize at a limited power budget. However, I agree that they are likely what is needed if we want to continue to scale upward in size.

I suspect the real bottleneck is a breakthrough in training itself. Backpropagation loss is too simplistic to optimize our current models perfectly, let alone future larger ones. But there is no guarantee a better alternative exists which may create a fixed limit to current ML approaches.