AI is improving at the same rate it always has

This is blatantly false, there’s a reason there is talk of the cold winter of AI, and the long walk in the desert.
The desert walk was at least 2 decades of very little progress despite big investments, the cold winter was another decade without much progress because of disillusionment so nobody wanted to invest in it.
AI has progressed more for the past 10-15 years than it did for 40 years from about the 70’s to about 2010.