Rumors mention recursive "self" improvement (training) already ongoing at big scale, better AIs training lesser AIs (still powerful), to became better AIs, and the cycle restarts. Maybe o1 and o3 are just the beginning of what was choosed to make available publicly (also the newer Sonnet).
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/this-rumor-about-gpt-...
The pace of change is actually uncertain, you could have revolutionary advances maybe 4-7 times this year, because the tide has changed and massive hardware (only available to few players) isn't a stopper anymore given that algorithms, software is taking the lead as the main force advancing AI development (anyone in the planet with a brain could make a radical leap in AI tech, anytime going forward).
https://sakana.ai/transformer-squared/
Beside the rumors and relatively (still) low impact recent innovations, we have history: remember that the technology behind gpt-2 existed basically two years before they made it public, and the theory behind that technology existed maybe 4 years before getting anything close to something practical.
All the public information is just old news. If you want to know where's everything going, you should look to where's the money going and/or where are the best teams working (deepseek, others like novasky > sky-t1).
Regardless of who is currently in the lead, China has its own GPUs and a lot of very smart people figuring out algorithmic and model design optimizations, so China will likely be in the lead more obviously within 1-2 years, both in hardware and model design.
This law is likely not going to be effective in its intended purpose, and it will prevent peaceful collaboration between US and Chinese firms, the kind that helps prevent war.
The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners. We should all fight to stop this.
You can only expect more algorithmic advances from now on.
The attempt of regulation falls within the limits of the (publicly available) SOTA AI technology from maybe a month ago, so it has been surpased by the reality of no one capable of being in control of the brain functions outside the selected countries for free interoperation of AI tech.
Those brains outside the wire were six months ago already creating the algorithmic breakthroughs we are currently witnessing, of course there's not only one (there are most certainly many improvements currently being pipelined for future models a few months from now), and they are actually fully independant of regulations from any country, you can expect just in this year, lots of radical breakthroughs, and given the new regulations, more players just further advancing the algorithmic side of the technology.
The regulation could have been effective only in an scenario where US and selected countries would control the fully indispensable hardware required to train and run advanced AI, which is not anymore indispensable.
The most radical forecastings clock the future (months, not years), training and deploying of frontier AIs (AGI/ASI level), at maybe weeks to few months of training using sintetic generated data (from opensource models already available), simply relying on standard datacenter level CPUs (not GPUs) for the backbone of the training infrastructure, and a light, precise use of limited GPUs (two, three years old datacenter GPU hardware), and distributing the training across several massive datacenters, if you care at all about speed (having the most advanced AI the faster you can). But anyway, the jumping forward framework could be just doing incremental advances, and letting the advanced AIs to just improve the algorithmic side of the technology development, so to just further making even more efficient the available hardware, one cycle of improvement at a time.
It's not a game over with hardware, US and allies could try to use to jump faster to more sophisticated AI, but the game cannot be controlled just by limiting the hardware, nor the difussion of advanced models.