At least they don't take people's jobs away or threaten / replace them. Unlike AI, which also burns GPUs, emits CO2 and the money is all evaporated into inference and training costs with little to no efficient alternatives to reduce it and also wasting tons of water.
Cryptocurrencies at least have alternative efficient methods of consensus, such as proof-of-stake making it possible to reduce the said resources as much as 95%.
AI (Deep Learning) still does not have practical efficient and viable greener alternatives to neither inference or training in production.
While you may see that I vigorously comment against all the AI hype, I do not believe AI is as useless and wasteful as crypto currencies.
Beyond the LLM fad, AI is also being used in other pharmaceutical and scientific research as well as modern weather and disaster forecasting.
Also, I believe LLMs will get better over time and far cheaper to operate once they become more widely adapted. Think the super computers of our grand-dad era vs your Android/iPhone.
AI will get better over time and become more beneficial to us, but not in the form of current over hype fad that is flying because Sama needs to protect his investment and exit, he is a businessman above all else. AI innovation will come from the silent group who are busy with actual development and less hype generation. There is a saying that empty whistle makes most noise etc.
My IDE(mostly jetbrains products) make me 10x more productive. Claude/Phind saves me immense amount of time not having to sort through 100 garbage SEO spam results or try to waste time reading incoherent out dated documentation(followed by having to look through the source code) to find an important concept or reference to some third party library/application. These are real values that not only makes my day less stressful, it also makes my employer benefit accordingly by having me available to other important stuff with my freed time during working hours.
Crypto currency did not help anyone, only helped some grifters get rich, some ignorant people to lose money and numerous crooks to run ransomware attacks and easier time moving the loot.
Cryptocurrencies at least have alternative efficient methods of consensus, such as proof-of-stake making it possible to reduce the said resources as much as 95%.
AI (Deep Learning) still does not have practical efficient and viable greener alternatives to neither inference or training in production.