DeepSeek claims to have cured AI’s environmental headache. The Jevons paradox suggests it might make things worse

William Stanley Jevons also invented an early computer. University of Manchester Libraries / wiki, CC BY-SA

AI burns through a lot of resources. And thanks to a paradox first identified way back in the 1860s, even a more energy-efficient AI is likely to simply mean more energy is used in the long run.

For most users, “large language models” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT work like intuitive search engines. But unlike regular web-searches that find and retrieve data from anywhere along a global network of servers, AI models return data they’ve generated from scratch. Like powering up a nuclear reactor to use a calculator, this tailored process is very inefficient.