I think you are right, and that the next step function can be achieved using the models we have, either by scaling the inference, or changing the way inference is done.
>>sitkac+(OP)
People are doing all manner of very sophisticated inferency stuff now - it just tends to be extremely expensive for now and... people are keeping it secret.
>>daniel+q9
If it was good enough to replace people then it wouldn't be too expensive, they would have launched it and replaced a bunch of people and made trillions of dollars by now.
So at best their internal models are still just performance multipliers unless some breakthrough happened very recently, it might be a bigger multiplier but that still keeps humans with jobs etc and thus doesn't revolutionize much.