“General populace”?

You wildly overestimate that the genpop has the faintest clue about the cost of AI. In my very few discussions with people that even bother to bring it up with curiosity absolutely none of them understood how big of a resource hog data centers are. A few might’ve had a clue that AI results can be wrong, but then they went on to basically apologize for AI’s current errors by stating how much good it could do via research while not having any idea what was different between say medical AI and one they use to make their animated memes or converse with.