the ML field is sustainable and productive... LLMs and LLM derivatives are not. they have an inherent use case which is why they'll stay around (unlike NFTs), but there are two factors that lead me to not be concerned about their climate impact for now:

1. all these big numbers you see about the AI buildup and its impact will probably never happen because i think the enthusiasm runs out and kills the bubble before oversupply takes over and pops it.

2. chinese models are far more efficient and cheaper to run while being open weight, i think they will absolutely dominate unless US companies also make cheaper models. regardless in both scenarios the compute needed falls drastically. granted they are still not sustainable, but they are better in that regard.

i think the available infrastructure right now can perfectly handle the natural demand for this tech at this point. the issue is that they keep selling this idea of "AGI" and total AI domination, which is not going to happen, at least with transformers and LLMs. there's also the structural issues with ML approaches, like past is not a reliable indicator of the future and not everything can be optimised and represented by an objective function.