One aspect of this I don't see mentioned all that often is that AI is competing for computing resources that are at least somewhat limited in the short to medium term while being pretty inefficient at utilizing those resources compared to alternatives.

A medium end gaming PC can display impressively realistic graphics at high resolutions and framerates while also being useful for a variety of other computationally intensive processing tasks like video encoding, compiling large code bases, etc. Or it can be used to host deeply mediocre local LLMs.

The actual frontier models from companies like Anthropic or OpenAI require vastly more expensive computing resources, resources that could otherwise be used for potentially more useful computation that isn't so inefficient. Think of all the computing power going into frontier models but applied to weather forecasting or cancer research or whatever.

Of course it's not either or, but as this article and similar ones point out, chips and other computing resources aren't infinite and AI for now at least has a seemingly insatiable appetite and enough dollars to starve other uses.

(Sharing a comment I recently posted on a similar thread..)

For last 2+ years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing.

New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment.

Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits).

It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else.

And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.

Define "efficient" in this context.

The point of the gold rush now is that a large number of investors think AI will be more efficient at converting GPU and RAM cycles into money than games or other applications will. Hence they are willing to pay more for the same hardware.