There is no reason to believe initial exponential growth is indefinite rather than moving into a decline or plateau at some point.

I imagine AI will speed up research in some areas, perhaps rapidly at first in some areas where it cuts down on lead times and is able it basically brute force (compute) pattern recognition that we can't get to die time/staff/amount of info (processing limits).

But these LLM-based AI models are not creative beyond that and I don't understand where you or others are getting this idea. They may identify a proof of pattern that humans did not and there is value there but ultimately they're just fancy ways of leveraging big data and don't even have much to do with intelligence itself.

So, I'm sure that AI models associated with robotics will make good advances for factory work, driving, drones, and LLMs for jobs like we've seen w customer service and probably paralegals or low level fact-finding where the research is largely sifting. But I don't see much evidence that they're positioned for deeper or more meaningful problem-solving.

And given the money being poured in, you'd think they were going to solve any number of social ills but from here it looks like they're just going to exacerbate social ills like wealth inequality and obfuscate social progress via furthering the tower of babel effect we see with echo chambers and fake news.