I see people saying that these kinds of things are happening behind closed doors, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence of it, and there is enormous propensity for AI speculation to run rampant.
The signs are not there but while we may not be on an exponential curve (which would be difficult to see), we are definitely on a steep upward one which may get steeper or may fizzle out if LLM's can only reach human level 'intelligence' but not surpass it. Original article was a fun read though and 360,000 words shorter than my very similar fiction novel :-)