I agree with most of what you say but I think it might be a bubble. Compare to the internet in 1999. Everyone could see that it wasn't going away, and had immense potential. Money was pouring in to ideas that had no paying customers and would not really be workable at scale for another decade or more. Most of it was lost because the vision was too far ahead of the technical and practical reality at the time.
We're in dial-up days of AI but investors are ignoring the reality that it's still way too early to know what it will ultimately look like and what customers will want to pay for. But FOMO rules.
What's the relative energy cost of operating LLMs compared with dialup?
On a finite planet, given some level of biological diversity is important to our survival, I find it increasingly difficult to justify development of these novel luxuries.
Jevon’s paradox in action - improvements in the efficiency have caused our usage of these resources to soar.
If you think AI uses a lot of energy now, just wait until there’s commercially successful use-cases.
On the other hand it’s also no different from any other production process in our economy. Just newer. Why improve steel production if that’s just going to lead to more steel consumption?
If you didn’t want to maximize paperclips maybe it was/is a mistake to build our economy around paperclip maximizers.
We're in dial-up days of AI but investors are ignoring the reality that it's still way too early to know what it will ultimately look like and what customers will want to pay for. But FOMO rules.