It is the consensus. I can’t think of a single good researcher I know who doesn’t think this. The last holdout might have been Sutskever, and at NeurIPS he said pretaining as we know it is ending because we ran out of data and synthetics can’t save it. If you have an alternative proposal for how it avoids death I’d love to hear it but currently there are 0 articulated plans that seem plausible and I will bet money that this is true of most researchers.