The energy equation can be improved dramatically with tailor-made hardware. Bitcoin has showed how much was possible, these days using even the fastest gpu is totally unviable. Of course llm inference is much more complex but there's still much optimization to be had.

And 10$ isn't an awful lot of money to justify. It's like half an hour a month (and like a smoke break's worth of salary in silicon valley lol)

I think AI has its uses. I just think they are overblown and applied too widely. There's a few things it's really good at. And in those cases it will shine. The rest is hype.