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.

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.

the total cost spent on tokens may go up, but i just cant imagine per token costs going up

It is incredibly cheap now. What sectors are you thinking of?

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.

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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The demand for them is growing _per person_, not just across the wider economy, if tokens cost half as much but you want to use 3 times as much you're going to have to pay more.

Maybe 1000s of tokens per second unlocks realtime robotic decision making, and now every robot needs to continuously stream tokens to and from the cloud to operate. That could 1000x demand overnight, just to speculate :)

The price has been going down for ages, its not clear what you are pointing at

Nah, Jevon’s Paradox says that cheaper tokens will mean increased overall energy consumption.

If we can’t even build data centers, the least disruptive industrial use possible, there’s no hope to reindustrialize the US or anywhere outside of China.

>polluting on-site generators

how much pollution do you believe modern gas-turbine engines to produce?

>Not to mention the water use controversy.

what percentage of US water usage do you believe is by AI data centers?

OpenAI just dropped the price of Luna by 80% and Sol by 20-30%

We should be mindful of the context that many of these providers VERY likely have been selling their subscriptions at a substantial loss

So as much as i agree “more profits to stakeholders screw the customer”, i think its more of an emergency to get to profitability before the music stops.

Yes, I can bet on this happening. If anything, this is a net gain for consumers as it is a competitive market.