alt Hacker NewsThis may just be a classic case of Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
In short, better hardware will drive down token cost in the near-term, but will drive up the demand for tokens as it gets cheap enough for other sectors to start to use it heavily.
It comes from steam engines where economists originally thought that coal demand would plummet with more efficient engines, but it actually just meant that we found more uses for steam engines.
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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.
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.
It is incredibly cheap now. What sectors are you thinking of?
the total cost spent on tokens may go up, but i just cant imagine per token costs going up
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.
I cannot fathom tbe mindspace that leads to this being anythning but a simple observation. It might even make it all the way to obscure trivia or interesting observation, but paradox? Certainly not.
If you make the thing more accessible, more people are going to use it. If it consumes a resource, the use of that resource will increase in relation to the increased adoption.
Hydrogen engines use hydrogen. Making hydrogen engines cheaper will increase adoption. Increased adoption will increase consumption of hydrogen.
Like, who'd have ever thought "oh wow, we've gotten to the point that people can have a computer in their own home, surely electricity use will plummet." or "oh wow, more than 50% of the population can now feasibly purchase an internal combustion engine, surely fuel demand will plummet."
In the original context they'd decreased the cost and complexity of steam engines. Anyone who'd seen the amount of money people were making with the old steam engines would be clearly incentivized now that they have the same economic opportunity available for less capital up front. Therefore more steam engines, therefore more fuel demand. Who in their right mind would really be surprised that resource consumption went up when people could and did build more machines?