This is precisely a property of exponential growth, that it can take (seemingly) very long until it starts exploding.
What are you talking about it asymptoped at 5 units. It cant be described as exponential until it is exponential otherwise its better described as linear or polynomial if you must.
When people talk about AI taking off exponentially, usually they are talking about the AI using its intelligence to make intelligence-enhancing modifications to itself. We are very much not there yet, and need human coaching most of the way.
At the same time, no technology ever really follows a particular trend line. It advances in starts and stops with the ebbs and flows of interest, funding, novel ideas, and the discovered limits of nature. We can try to make projections - but these are very often very wrong, because the thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet.
