Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.
You can make pretty much the same arguments for LLMs. Pollution, corruption, and war are all things I'm keen to avoid.
And thus it is reasonable to not use LLMs. And it's not only the training process that's problematic. There are so many individual LLM users who waste electricity on tasks that they would have solved by thinking for themselves just a few years ago.
I think you can actually replace crypto with LLMs/Diffusion models in this sentence and it will still hold true
Not to defend crypto, but this all applies to fiat too
For whatever reason the folks on here refuse to understand that for a big chunk of this planet people get paid in inflationary currencies that they used to have to immediately convert to dollars and then stuff under a mattress because the local banking system is corrupt. In that environment cryptocurrency is a god send.
All those apply to AI too, no?
The way early adopters got rich was by scamming others, so not sure I see your differentiation there