Its not dying slowly right now at all.

Compute is a massive driver for everything ML. From number of experiments you can run in paralle, to how much RL you can try out, how long stuff is running etc.

ML is pushing scaling on dimensions we haven't had before (number of Datacenters, amount of energy we put into them) and ML is currently seen as the holy grail.

But i'm definitly very very curious how this compute and current progress is playing out in the next few years. It could be that we hit a hard ceiling were every single % point becomes tremendesly costly before we hit a % point of benchmark archievements which makes all of that usable daily. OR we will se a significant change to our society.

I do not think its something in between tbh because it def feels like in an expoential progress curve we are currently in.