Subject: Re: Power usage By AI
What worries me is that a larger and larger share of physical resources is being spent on mental universe. There is no physical return.

Bitcoin (blockchain technology) is a prime example. So much oil and natural gas wasted to maintain an incredibly inefficient database which doesn't live up to its hype - it's not trustless, it's not decentralized, it's not a monerary unit and it's not a measure of value. It's like spending trillions of watt-hours to print a few million baseball cards.
AI is another drain. Without an underlying truth source like Wikipedia (yes) or NYT or human trainers, token generation by LLMs is nothing intelligent. When all human-produced data has been mined, AI will stagnate as surely as an exhausted mine or an exhausted oilfield.