This is also a fair point, and part of my skepticism. I've absorbed from JMG a skepticism of anything that energy-intensive, especially if the economic value is so hand-wavey. This leaves me somewhere between "LLMs can't ever say anything useful" and "to say anything useful, LLMs will have to burn more energy than they're worth." I suppose it's possible that neither of these things will be true, at least in the short term, and perhaps in the long term (maybe fusion really is right around the corner!), but that's not the way I would bet.

This makes me simultaneously more and less pessimistic than the average AI booster - I think the capability of "take-off" is less likely than most of them, but I worry that the damage in the meantime might be greater than they anticipate.

I guess we'll see.

Cheers,
Jeff