It means that even if AI is having more environmental impact right now, there’s no reason to say “you can’t improve it that much.” Maybe you can improve it. As I said previously, a lot of research is being done on exactly that - methods to train and run AIs much more cheaply than it has so far. I see developments along those lines being discussed all the time in AI forums such as /r/localllama.

Much like with blockchains, though, it’s really popular to hate AI and “they waste enormous amounts of electricity” is an easy way to justify that. So news of such developments doesn’t spread easily.