I kind of see what you are getting at, and it could be the case with exponential improvements in methods/research that we see more discoveries in one year than all the previous at some point but I don't think we're there yet.

The progression has been linear in my view:

1. Efficient image classification (CNNs)

2. object detection / segmentation / pix2pix / basic img2text models (RCNNs, Unet, GANs)

3. Deep reinforcement learning (DQN, PPO, MCTS)

4. Attention networks (transformers and language modelling)

5. Basic question / answer and reasoning models

6. Low quality txt2img models (e.g. DALL-E 1)

7. High quality txt2img models (e.g. DALL-E 2, stable diffusion)

8. Multimodal modals (image understading etc) <- we are here

9. Already happening video2video models, text2mesh / point cloud

10. Expect low, then high quality multimodal generation models e.g. txt2video + music

11. Expect improved text understanding, general chat behaviour, ie large step ups in chatbot usefulness inclution ability to take actions (this part is already underway)

12. Expect some kind of attention based method for reading and writing to storage (i.e memory) and possibly online learning / continuous improvement

13 . More incrementally interesting stuff :)