Now that AI is using massive energy and the usual nags are coming out to criticize it, suddenly HN is promulgating the glorious benefits of such excess energy use. Pot meet kettle. Human nature never changes
Proof-of-work is set up as a competition. To earn coins, you need to burn more energy than anyone else (in order to win the hashing lottery). This means that energy usage trends upwards - if someone else builds a bigger coin farm than you, your incentive is to increase the size of yours even more.
With AI models, everyone is interested in finding and deploying new efficiencies. Have you noticed how the prices for hosted LLMs (OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini, Google's Gemini Flash, Anthropic's Haiku) keep dropping? That's because they keep finding new ways to optimize those models, serving useful results while using less energy to do it.
The AI space still has its competitive pressure: Google, Meta, Microsoft are all making huge speculative investments in GPUs and new data centers right now. But it's still not in the same class of waste as the proof-of-work competition used by Bitcoin.
Luckily we have a market for energy and we can all decide for ourselves what is useful energy use
Energy is good because it allows people to do things they care about. As long as the externalities are internalized [1] and the energy is paid for, the rest will mostly take care of itself.
[1] they aren't of course, but that's not crypto's fault and it's not AI's fault either