Then there's Ethereum, which just completed a major upgrade to convert its Proof of Work method to Proof of Stake and now uses a negligible amount of energy compared to other things, as shown in this article on their site[1].
And there are newer cryptocurrencies like Solana, that started as proof of stake to begin with and can handle at least 8500[2] transactions per second (compared to only 4 transactions per second with the much older bitcoin, and 30 transactions per second with Ethereum).
That's a hell of a lot more efficient as well, and also seems to be more efficient than ChatGPT is per query, as Solana's energy use per transaction is 3,290 Joules, or 0.00091 kWh[3], versus the conservative estimate of ChatGPT (3.5)'s estimated energy usage on this article [4] of 0.00198 kWh, or 7,128 Joules.
So I think that overall, crypto is still incentivized to become more efficient. Bitcoin is not, as more people care about the security provided by proof of work there than they do about energy efficiency, which is unfortunate.
[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
[2]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...
[3]: https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-september-...
[4]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...
With AI there are strong incentives to make everything more efficient and use less energy. This is already happening: people are finding ways to run AI models on less powerful hardware (see LLaMA etc), and AI providers like OpenAI have managed to run things. Lee efficiently - that's presumably how they could drop the price of an API call by 1/10th for GPT3.5 compared to GPT3.
With Bitcoin efficiencies don't actually help, because the entire system is designed as a competition. The person who burns more energy wins more value. If the tech becomes more efficient the miners just increase their activity, so energy usage doesn't meaningfully decrease.