So your claim for optimism here is that something today that took ~10^22 floating point operations (based on an estimate earlier in the thread) to execute will be running on phones in 25 years? Phones which are currently running at O(10^12) flops. That means ten orders of magnitudes of improvement for that to run in a reasonable amount of time? It's a similar scale up in going from ENIAC (500 flops) to a modern desktop (5-10 teraflops).

It's not so much the cost as much the fact that they got a slightly better result by throwing 172x more compute per/task. The fact that it may have cost somewhere north of $1 million simply helps to give a better idea of how absurd the approach is.

It feels a lot less like the breakthrough when the solution looks so much like simply brute-forcing.

But you might be right, who cares? Does it really matter how crude the solution is if we can achieve true AGI and bring the cost down by increasing the efficiency of compute?