Technology

will therefore never be good enough?

no one said that. but someone did try to reject the fact it is demonstrably bad right now, because "there is a trajectory".

I think the one argument for the assumption that we're near peak already is the entire issue of AI learning from AI input. I think numberphile discussed a maths paper that said that to achieve the accuracy that we want, there is simply not enough data to train it on.

That's of course not to say that we can't find alternative approaches

We're close to peak using current NN architectures and methods. All this started with the discovery of transformer architecture in 2017. Advances in architecture and methods have been fairly small and incremental since then. The advancements in performance has mostly just been throwing more data and compute at the models, and diminishing returns have been observed. GPT-3 costed something like $15 million to train. GPT-4 is a little better and costed something like $100 million to train. If the next model costs $1 billion to train, it will likely be a little better.

I appreciate the XKCD comic, but I think you’re exaggerating that other commenter’s intent.

i don't think so. the other commenter clearly rejects the critic(1) and implies that existence of upward trajectory means it will one day overcome the problem(2).

while (1) is well documented fact right now, (2) is just wishful thinking right now.

hence the comic, because "the trajectory" doesn't really mean anything.