Some people critique LLMs as being just like BitCoin: a massive energy hog.

However, there's a key difference.

In BitCoin, the energy use is the point.

The price of computation is load bearing.

It's what makes the ecosystem hard to fork, in proportion with how much energy is invested.

As computers get more efficient at doing the mining, that gives the entity with the more efficient hardware an edge to do more mining.

With LLMs however, everyone wants the energy use per unit quality to go down.

Users benefit as it goes down.

And providers want it to go down to get an edge over competitors, which then sets a new baseline expectation for users, which then leads to a further round to get more of an edge..

Everyone wins!

A critique of this analysis: as LLM inference cost goes down, demand will rise for the now cheaper inference.