kinda complicated though when you consider it fully. Power consumption only measures the environmental impact really, we come up with more clever ways to use the same amount of power daily.

it's kind of like an electrical motor that exists before the strong understanding of lorentz/ohm's law. We don't really know how inefficient the thing is because we don't really know where the ceiling is aside from some loosey theoretical computational efficiency concepts that don't strongly apply to practical LLMs.

to be clear, I don't disagree that it's the limiting factor, just that 'limits' is nuanced here between effort/ability and raw power use.