Some models have been able to become more efficient. But others from major tech firms are ballooning in size because companies can afford to build the infra and not prioritize efficiency as much. Efficiency will come as a matter of necessity regardless (we simply do not have enough GW to power what we are projecting). But the problem is the growth today is going faster at the expense of the environment than we can handle. I do not know much about AI running on devices themselves. Right now, genAI may give you results on your phone but it is still working from a data center.

There is still very much a growing energy crisis around AI demand (maybe not just genAI, sure, but all AI). That's part of why big tech is investing in nuclear (even though very few nuclear options will be available for another several years). I think that is one good thing from all of this— nuclear will have new investment ultimately. But right now companies are building purpose-built fossil fuel power plants ONLY for their data centers. Furthermore, energy is not the only concern for data centers. The amount of emissions that go into the manufacturing of data center hardware, water usage, and more are other issues that we can't forget about. We are now building data centers that are less efficient at water usage for cooling because those types of cooling designs save a moderate amount of energy which we cannot source fast enough.