My assumption is that frontier models will be constantly increasing in intelligence, solving far more difficult problems, while the rest of us do the LLM equivalent of scratching through the dirt with wooden hoes.

Thinking about just the domain of the stock market only: getting a "win" on it means getting a leg up on everyone else participating. Best example I can think of of a pure zero sum intelligence contest. Programming UIs might have a point where you just can't get smarter at it, but in an intelligence contest like a stock market, I don't think there's a ceiling.

In "Accelerando" this was covered by the invention of "Economics 2.0." AI agents also got into a lot of lawfare in that book.