Comment by turtles3

To be fair, newer research is demonstrating that smaller more power efficient models with the same performance are possible, so the hope is that these giant LLMs are just a stepping stone to a less energy hungry place. In contrast, proof of work fundamentally needs more energy then bigger the network gets. It's no guarantee but we can at least see some hope that as energy impact drops and increasing value is found that 'AI' will cross the threshold of being worth the energy.

Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for some people than doing science, then when intelligence is cheap we are in for a rough time.