I think I agree with you. Though I would point out that what caused this great leap forward in AI development was not using the entire internet to train the model, but rather the development of the transformer model. So it is not exactly fair to say that the development of AI was spurred on mainly by training it on the whole internet. Plenty of other models were attempted and didn't work because they hadn't solved the problems which the transformer solves. Considering that, it is certainly possible that a new type of model (that isn't a transformer, or is a variant of the transformer) would perform exponentially (or seemingly exponentially) better than the transformer model currently does for the same reason that the transformer performed better than other models with the same data.

Though personally, I think improvement may come in figuring out how to "school" these models. IE make them learn from humans like students do in school (though obviously in different ways). IE make it so the models can ask a qualified teacher questions and remember the answers they are given. This may solve hallucination problems, and somehow find a way to make the model aware when it does not know something. Obviously this kind of is counter intuitive to how artificial intelligence works, but there's a reason why we don't just have students figure stuff out for themselves, and now that we've made AI capable of learning on its own, I think it could be vastly improved by figuring out how to make it learn from human interaction. I forget where I read it, but I read or heard somewhere (maybe from you) that AI or computers do not perform best at chest by themselves, but rather it is AI with humans that perform the best at chest. If that statement is true, it probably is applicable to this idea.