I don‘t think it is this simple. I think there is a subset of problems (namely ones that can utilize automatic solver or some other kinds of automatic testers and verifiers) where reaching the solution is correlated with the spent energy.

Maybe people will find some clever way to expand this domain of AI-solvable problems by a couple of more categories, or (more likely) find a clever way of using applying these verifier for problems that was previously not viable, thus changing the solution to “just spend more energy computing dummy”. However I think this too will have its limits.

Regardless, this is still annoying and I want them to stop doing this. Solving math problems should not be relegated to whoever has the most money to spend the most compute.