I want to note that everything you talk about is happening on the scales of months to single years. That’s incredibly rapid pace, and also too short of a timeframe to determine true research trends.
Usually research is considered rapid if there is meaningful progression within a few years, and more realistically about a decade or so. I mean, take something like real time ray tracing, for comparison.
When I’m talking about the future of AI, I’m thinking like 10-20 years. We simply don’t know enough about what is possible to say what will happen by then.