...although to be fair, this symptom is not new.
I did my PhD on fluid simulations, and there have always been people around me taking pride in using the largest meshes to run the biggest simulations taking up most resources on the biggest clusters, and some amount of contempt for those who put effort into doing more with less.
Macho engineers are a thing. Maybe no surprise, that.
At least I had the better-looking meshes 
We've had students implementing pretty interesting and useful functionality that partially uses LLMs -- and the largest effort of implementation was putting a precise logical task into squishy human words, in order to make a precise logical machine produce a valid solution for the precise problem.
Neither AI nor informatics are my field but I'm sure this *must* be horribly inefficient. Funny enough, none of the students seemed to agree.