I agree! I think it’s “worth it”. A parallel: it costs an OOM more to drive places than, say, bike places, but it allows us to do the things we did before an OOM faster and expands the types of things we can do.
You can make the argument that it’s not “worth it” in terms of cost to our environment, but you have to acknowledge the upside of it simultaneously.
And the dynamics are different in that we’ve reached an efficiency asymptote with cars and are still in the middle (or perhaps at the start) of the S curve with AI systems.