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.
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.
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.
