[afavour]

That's an awful amount of certainty for something that isn't backed by very much certainty at all. Just "previous claims about inefficiency in tech have ended up being incorrect".

As a counterpoint: look at crypto. The amount of power used by cryptocurrency has _not_ gone down, in fact it's increased.

[patapong]

While I don't disagree with your overall point, I don't think crypto is a good counterpoint here. Crypto is conditioned on using more and more energy to secure the network. As the value increases, more mining hardware can be thrown at it, which increases security adn thus value - there is no upper bound.

AI on the other hand aims at both increased quality but also reduced energy consumption. While there are certainly developments that favour the latter at the cost of the latter (e.g. reasoning models), there are also indications that companies are finding ways to make the models more efficient while maintaining quality. For example, the moves from GPT-4 -> GPT-4-turbo and 4o -> 5 were speculated to be in the service of efficiency. Hopefully the market forces that make computing cheaper and more energy effective will also push AI to become more energy effective over time.