I'm only tangential to the area, but my impression over the decades is that what is going to happen is that, eventually, designing the next generation is going to require more resources than the current generation can provide, thereby putting a hard stop at the exponential growth stage.

I'd even dare to claim we are already at the point where the growth has stopped, but even then you will only see the effect in a decade or so as there are still many small low-hanging fruits you can fix, but no big improvements.