Not surprising. Despite the enormous energy costs and the threat to humanity by creating technology that we can't control, governments and corporations will build bigger and more sophisticated models just because they have to do so to compete. It is the prisoner's dilemma: we end up with a super-advanced AI that will disrupt and make society worse because entities are competing where the metric of success is short-te…
It might be dangerous, but how is it useless? There is also an enormous positive gain to be had in terms of autonomous discovery, science progress and so on. And prisoner's dilemma means "we" will not stop pursuing this, even of there is a net negative benefit to humanity overall.
I do not think there is an enormous positive gain. Science progress in my opinion has gone too far in many respects and we should not be able to generate science so easily because we will not have the wisdom to use it. Although I love science, it's use is far too lackadaisical now -- see for example the climate crisis and efficient resource extraction of fossil fuels.
Then we can imagine things like life-extending drugs, immunity from all disease (bad because it implies overpopulation), methods to generate oxygen (bad because it will mean we won't value the natural ecosystem as much), etc.
Smartphones, computer technology (human-isolating and community-destroying), etc. Pretty much all modern inventions are making life worse.