I do see what you're saying. You can account for all of these factors and it still turns out that, largely, individual LLM use just doesn't use that much power compared to most things people do day to day. Inference is so cheap that even dozens of requests don't amount to much. I could look up and give you a bunch of numbers, but I don't think that's likely to convince anyone who doesn't do the research themselves. It's so easy to come up with sources that say what you want. I'd encourage you to actually look into this yourself.

Training costs are higher, but you train once and use repeatedly. Right now, total training costs are stupidly high, but that's because we've got an arms race between the frontier labs to spend as much money and compute as they can for truly marginal gains in quality. The solution to that problem isn't for individuals to stop using AI, it's to stop those assholes from wasting so much power.

Individual LLM use is so cheap, that it really isn't worth wasting people's energies thinking about limiting that. Instead of being distracted by attempts to make this an issue of personal responsibility, we should be focusing on what will actually make a difference. We should be focused on supporting policies that lead to systemic change. A carbon tax would change corporate behavior right quick, and not just for AI companies.

I'm going to simplify a little here, so don't take this completely at face value.

Models are, quite literally, long series of numbers (called weights). A model might store the weights in 16 bit numbers (that is, 16 binary digits). The size of the model (and how much memory it needs) is determined by how many weights there are, and how many bits each weight takes. You can take a 16 bit model and rework it to use 8 bit, or even 4 bit numbers. The result intuitively behaves a lot like the same model, but with less precision to the weights. That makes the model take way less space in ram, but also makes it more likely for concepts (encoded in the weights) to overlap, which impacts model quality. Often the effect is that fine distinctions get lost.

Kind of like "compressed". It takes longer/more effort to run them, to produce the same result as a the same model that has not been quantized, where that non-quantized version would consume significantly more RAM but produce the result faster. You would typically only run the quantized model when you're starved for RAM, which most of us are running LLMs locally.

Think like zipping a file with file compression. It takes less space, but has to be unzipped for you to have usable files again.