I'm suprised there isn't more "hope" in this area. Even things like the GPT Pro models; surely that sort of reasoning/synthesis will eventually make its way into local models. And that's something that's already been discovered.

Just the other day I was reading a paper about ANNs whose connections aren't strictly feedforward but, rather, circular connections proliferate. It increases expressiveness at the (huge) cost of eliminating the current gradient descent algorithms. As compute gets cheaper and cheaper, these things will become feasible (greater expressiveness, after all, equates to greater intelligence).