4-5 orders of magnitude is huge. Assuming an order of base 10, it's 10000x-100000x. So a call to grep may return in 1s on a typical PC. That means a GPT call takes equivalent energy of 10000-100000 PCs to do the same in 1s. That's a difference that can't be equalized with scaling. It would require a revolutionary breakthrough.

I also don't understand where the idea that frontier models are getting better efficiency comes from. The results are certainly improving, but that comes from feedback and multiplexing requests, which cost more.