I'm concerned that developing better metacognition is really just throwing more finite resources at the problem. We surely don't have unlimited compute, or unlimited (V)RAM, and so there must be a wall here. If it could be demonstrated that this improved metacognition was coming without associated increases in resource utilization, I would find these improvements to be much more convincing... but as things stand, we're very much not there.

(There may be an argument here re: the move from dense to MoE models, but all research I am aware of suggests that MoE models are not dramatically more efficient than dense models - i.e., active parameter count is not the overriding factor, and total parameter count is still extremely important, though it does seem to roughly follow a power law.)