Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable.

The author also talks about advances like smartphones as though they arrived without significant challenges or trade-offs. Every major technological shift has come with some cost, e.g environmental, shortages, investments.

I'd argue most things are difficult to scale in the beginning. Just because today's LLMs are expensive and resource intensive doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally flawed, it may simply mean the current approach isn't the one we'll end up with. But naturally, someone working on another approach would have something to criticise about others.

Finally, I'm not convinced by the claim that we're "stuck" with LLMs just because they're heavily marketed. They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly. As the author points out, investors care about economics. I'm sure people would listen if someone developed a cheaper/more sustainable technology that delivered the same value.