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by jrflo9 hours ago |
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upvoteby kilroy1239 hours ago|
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This is exactly what I see happening now.

Codex keeps doing these usage resets. What do I do? Burn even more tokens than ever before. I know I'm not the only one.

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upvoteby sobellian9 hours ago|
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If we are applying Jevons paradox to this then the unit being consumed is not tokens but the inputs for token production - power, capex, something else. To draw an analogy to the steam engine, coal:electricity::mechanical-work:tokens. Jevons paradox does not talk about mechanical work becoming cheaper in the short term setting up a sort of rubber band of demand creating spiking prices for mechanical work. Compared to the renaissance, mechanical work was much cheaper throughout the industrial revolution and remains cheaper to this day. We can still definitely say that the easier it is to produce tokens, the cheaper they will be.
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upvoteby vlovich1232 hours ago|
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All Jevon’s paradox says is that as a resource becomes cheaper total consumption of that resource increases. It applies equally well to the inputs of token production as it does to the tokens themselves. The former would describe the effect the sellers into AI companies see (energy, GPU chips, RAM etc - if they lower their prices they’ll have more overall consumption) while the latter describes what the AI companies see with their customers (if they lower token prices consumers will use more tokens overall).
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upvoteby anthonypasq9 hours ago|
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the total cost spent on tokens may go up, but i just cant imagine per token costs going up
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upvoteby jrflo9 hours ago|
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Depends on compute capacity. If we become supply constrained on tokens, then prices will necessarily go up.
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upvoteby anthonypasq9 hours ago|
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no they dont because inference stacks are getting more efficient and models are getting more intelligent per parameter.
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upvoteby vlovich1232 hours ago|
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I would posit there’s no way in hell they’re getting sufficiently cheaper on a short enough time frame vs how much demand is sky rocketing. AI companies are seeing quarterly doubling of revenue if not more.
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upvoteby cactusplant73745 hours ago|
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It is incredibly cheap now. What sectors are you thinking of?
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upvoteby holoduke7 hours ago|
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That's when demand is higher than capacity. Now imagine places like Gigalab and Chinese labs are online and able to produce significant percentage of chips. That could cause real surge in prices.
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upvoteby altmanaltman9 hours ago|
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I think you're reducing a very complex thing (the global economy) into a very simplistic model (Jevons' paradox) and thinking both are the same thing. This has no predictive power or rigor. You're just wishing things would happen as they did before, without considering that conditions and situations change significantly, and instead of Jevon's paradox, we look back at today 50 years from now and talk about Jensen's paradox.

This doesn't mean the concept is BS, but one single concept cannot explain away everything in such a system.

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upvoteby goodmythical9 hours ago|
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[flagged]
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upvoteby senordevnyc8 hours ago|
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There is something counter-intuitive about the idea that making an engine that accomplishes the same amount of work with half the fuel will result in MORE fuel usage overall. You might expect it to be the same, or decline slightly, but the paradoxical element is that overall consumption goes up.

And you can say of course, it's so obvious, how could a dumdum not see that! But then there are lots of examples of things where increased efficiency results in less usage overall, because demand is inelastic, etc. Jevon's paradox doesn't apply to everything.

I don't think we know yet what is going to happen as software development gets much cheaper. If in ten years we can produce software 1000x more cost effectively, will we need fewer software engineers, the same, or more? Guess we'll see!

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upvoteby Imustaskforhelp7 hours ago|
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> I don't think we know yet what is going to happen as software development gets much cheaper. If in ten years we can produce software 1000x more cost effectively, will we need fewer software engineers, the same, or more? Guess we'll see!

Adding onto it, I feel as if this relates to some points regarding predictions of future in general. It is easier for us to look from the future to the past and think that it must be very obvious (as you also mention) but its also very counter-intuitive at the same time and there are just so so much nuance about basically any situation within it that its hard to really capture it all, and even then, be prepared for surprises and counter-intuitiveness.

I really like the Peter Drucker quote about it.

“The only thing we know about the future is that it will surprise us.” — Peter Drucker

and, “The future is fundamentally different from the past.” — Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921)

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