nothing new going on
Uhhhh the available models are improving by leaps and bounds by the month, and there's quite a bit of tangible advancement happening every week. Even more critically the models that can be run on a single computer are very quickly catching up to those that just a year or two ago required some percentage of a hyperscaler's datacenter to operate
Unless you mean to say that the current insane pace of advancement is all built off of decades of research and a lot of the specific advancements recently happen to be fairly small innovations into previous research infused with a crapload of cash and hype (far more than most researchers could only dream of)