This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto. We start with room sized monsters like ENIAC and improve and improve until something better fits in a solar powered watch.
Subjective.
> Nobody in AI likes paying big power bills.
Nobody anywhere "likes" big power bills, including in crypto. That said for crypto, this actually had the effect of driving everyone to the lowest priced power sources on the planet (many of which ended up being 'green' energy) and building more efficient systems.
The fact of the matter is that AI is so hot right now that people are paying absurd rates for power and nobody is talking about the usage. Like I said above, datacenter demand is off the charts right now. They are announcing space on a Friday and it is gone by Monday.
> This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto. We start with room sized monsters like ENIAC and improve and improve until something better fits in a solar powered watch.
"except for crypto" is wrong.
ETH started as an ENIAC and now it is a solar powered watch. In fact, ETH pegged itself to GPUs from the start, which meant that it didn't have the same sort of hardware competition that Bitcoin has. ETH's PoW algo is memory hard and limited by the onboard controller bandwidth, which meant that the fastest GPUs were not always the more ROI efficient... you didn't need to continuously upgrade the hardware to latest greatest.
Note: Was memory hard. ETH's PoW algo was abandoned by the main chain as of last year.
ETH is not using PoW any longer having switched to PoS.
Other chains, like ETC, still use PoW and the memory hard ethash algo.
A lot of AI's power usage is going towards generating images, or writing fiction, or doing any number of other things that don't help people improve any kind of physical processes. That's not to get into the GPU usage of video games, which by every economic measure consist of entirely useless calculations. In both AI and crypto you can find people using the resources to perform "useful" and "not useful" calculations; it's all subjective and at the end of the day people have the right to run up their electricity bill on whatever they fancy.
> If somebody invents a chip that uses 10% of the power, the industry would gladly adopt it and decrease consumption by 90%.
If someone created an invention that used 0.012% of the power to run a blockchain, many chains would gladly adopt it and decrease their energy consumption by 99.988%.
In fact that's exactly what Ethereum did, with its move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Now, almost every new chain is PoS.
> This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto.
Ethereum did it.