It's more interesting to ask, "Does AI need to follow the current model of evil megacorps building massive data centres that, collectively, guzzle more energy than most nations on Earth?"

Perhaps LLM's (or something better) will develop to be more efficient and quickly become something most people run on local hardware. Perhaps fad-obsessed management types will move onto the next big thing and AI will start being used more judiciously. Perhaps society will set sane regulatory limits that shape the direction AI is going in, from models that take jobs people want to models that, given the right hardware, can do the jobs few want.

Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to succeed for AI to succeed. If they turn out to be a bubble that bursts and torches a lot of investors, it might actually be a fundamentally good thing for everybody else.