I'm a bit on the fence myself, as I think it's very harmful, but I can also see ways it can be useful. But it's absolutely mindblowing how this is nearly always completely out of the discussion even though our current way of living and powering things is on a timer and we still haven't addressed it as a whole.
I’m only half joking.
Bullshit.
Even if this was true (and so far that doesn't seem to be the case), that's not how commodities work.
You can't just measure how much your thing uses, because even if it was running purely on green energy you also have to keep in mind other consumers that end up displaced onto worse sources. The only fair way to measure this is by the worst generator on your grid, because that's who would be shut down w/o your demand.
And even if we assume that the entire grid was green, building out that capacity also has (environmental) costs! As does producing those GPUs, for that matter.
Maybe LLMs will help lead to a breakthrough in nuclear fusion or battery research.
Degrowth is the philosophy of poverty, and a poverty of philosophy.
As for the breakthroughs, maybe they will, maybe they won't; it's not much of an argument.