> frontier research is halted but efficiency isn't

Why are you treating those as if they're separate things?

> Advancing the frontier seems to take a massive amount of compute, data, and parameters: miniaturization only happens afterwards.

This is just completely wrong. Don't mistake the path by which something happened (or appeared to an outsider to have happened) for a fundamental truth.

The frontier labs build massive models because if you're competing and you have a lot of cash and brute force is a viable option then it's easy and predictable. But the fundamental research itself doesn't in general require scale (certainly not entire datacenters) and models at any given capability level keep shrinking.

I keep repeating myself at this point but the human brain is on the order of 20 watts. That's a fraction of a single datacenter GPU! So again, would you have us destroy all chip fabs and ban all biomedical research?