Jevons Paradox ☆

Jevons (1865) observed that more efficient steam engines increased total coal use: cheaper output finds more uses. Satya Nadella invoked it the week DeepSeek-R1 crashed NVIDIA's stock — cheaper intelligence, he argued, means vastly more intelligence consumed. The 2025 record (token prices down, token volumes and capex up) has so far behaved exactly as the paradox predicts; whether it holds at every scale is unproven.