A/B happen at different abstractions levels. My abstraction level will be automated. My manager’s level will probably last another year or so.

What you described makes sense, and it's just one of the things to try. There are lots of other research directions: online learning, more efficient learning, better loss/reward functions, better world models from training on Youtube/VR simulations/robots acting in real world, better imitation learning, curriculum learning, etc. There will undoubtedly be architectural improvements, hardware improvements, longer context windows, insights from neuroscience, etc. There is still so much to research. And there are more AI researchers now than ever. Plus current AI models already make us (AI researchers) so much more productive. But even if absolutely no further progress is made in AI research, and foundational model development stops today, there's so much improvement to be made in the tooling around the models: agentic frameworks, external memory management, better online search, better user interactions, etc. The whole LLM field is barely 5 years old.

I have enough savings for a few years, so I might just move to a lower COL area, and wait it out. Hopefully after the initial chaos period things will improve.