

well. indeed the devil’s in the detail.
But going with your story. Yes, you are right in general. But the human input is already there.
But you have to have human-made material to train the classifier, and if the classifier doesn’t improve, then the generator never does either.
AI can already understand what stripes are, and can draw the connection that a zebra is a horse without stripes. Therefore the human input is already given. Brute force learning will do the rest. Simply because time is irrelevant and computations occur at a much faster rate.
Therefore in the future I believe that AI will enhance itself. Because of the input it already got, which is sufficient to hone its skills.
While I know for now we are just talking about LLMs as blackboxes which are repetitive in generating output (no creativity). But the 2nd grader also has many skills which are sufficient to enlarge its knowledge. Not requiring everything taught by a human. in this sense.
I simply doubt this:
LLMs will get progressively less useful
Where will it get data about new programming languages or solutions to problems in new software?
On the other hand you are right. AI will not understand abstractions of something beyond its realm. But this does not mean it wont expedite in stuff that it can draw conclusions from.
And even in the case of new programming languages, I think a trained model will pick up the logic of the code - basically making use of its already learned pattern recognition skills. And probably at a faster pace than a human can understand a new programming language.
den wirtschaftsmotor namens rene benko nicht vergessen der gerade stottert.