Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful.
Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
Does this claim presuppose that people will forever be content to use a circa 2026 ML model? If so, that seems unlikely to me.
All the products and services based on it like Microsoft's many copilots are totally beta quality and not really ready for the mainstream. In a couple years they probably will be and I'm sure the usage will have increased tenfold.
On the other hand I'm sure many optimisations in hardware have been accomplished. But I don't think it can be compared to bitcoin which is a more mature technology (as much as one can call a disorganised macro-economic experiment mature)
More is more.