Yes, a forest of specialists is vastly more performant than a monolithic general model.
It means you can go much further with less data and also generate a much lighter model that is faster.
Discussion
At my company we copied a cephalopod architecture back in 2019 and it was a lot better.
In my mind an octopus forest is the best chance at making something that looks and feels like AGI.
But personally I don’t think general intelligence is a thing, I think humans approximate to a stack of ~5,000 skillsets.
Yes, that makes sense and we're already beginning to see niche LLMs for things like health. Large orgs will definitely want their own version trained on their IP and where the data doesn't leave their servers.