> Right now the barrier is data and compute.

Those are pretty significant barriers seeing as we're closed to/have exhausted all the data on the internet and most of those compute bottlenecks are a castle of sand of dodgy finance deals that are getting blocked by community action.

You say "synthetic data" but that's still vaporware right now in terms of being useful for model training. The good synthetic data uses are still grounded in real data and it's a coin flip on if it works well or not.