Latest news with #Jevons
7NEWS
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 7NEWS
Bali tourist divides TikTok after posting argument with Finns Beach Club staff over ‘hair found in food'
A tourist has filmed an argument with the security team at Bali's famous Finns Beach Club after allegedly finding hair in his food, but his entitled approach has divided opinions. Connor Jevons, from Liverpool in the UK, shared a video on TikTok at the weekend of the tense confrontation between him and the staff at the popular Canggu venue — which is owned by Australian property developer and former AFL player Tony Smith. In the video, the 26-year-old approaches staff demanding a reimbursement for his food. 'I need to speak with the owner, I have a situation that I need to sort,' Mr Jevons tells a lady at the front desk. After speaking to the manager he shows her a video he took the day before of his burger and fries being served to him at a poolside VIP table, zooming in on what he claims is a hair in his food. 'I will not post this video as long as we sort this situation out,' he tells the manager. 'Did you request to replace the food?' the manager asked Mr Jevons. 'No, no because I was drunk... I didn't want to cause a problem, because you know sometimes when you're drunk you get aggressive,' Mr Jevons explains. He tells the manager that his table spent roughly 7.8 million Indonesian Rupiah, which is about $730 Australian dollars, adding that he has been to the venue on other occasions and spent similar amounts. 'So you want the money back for the food that you ordered?' the manager asks. 'I want all the money back, not just the food but for the whole night,' Mr Jevons responds. 'We can't do it,' the staff members says in regards to his refund request. Mr Jevons leaves his phone recording while more security staff surround the British tourist and ask him to leave. When Mr Jevons doesn't move, he is escorted out while he speaks to the camera in protest. 'People, this is what happens at Finns Beach Club. . . this is meant to be the 'world's best beach club',' he shouts. 'Everybody stop touching me,' he demands, while looking for his motorbike. 'I'm looking for my motorbike bro,' Mr Jevons repeats after a security guard pushes him away from the beach club. Mr Jevons continues to ask security for a refund, telling the guards about the following he has on TikTok. 'I will delete all of the footage if you give me my reimbursement,' he tells the security guards while they try to find his motorbike. Mr Jevons posted the video on his TikTok account, asking his 100,000 followers what their thoughts on the situation are. Over a million people have viewed the video and followers have replied with differing opinions, some applauding Mr Jevons and others unconvinced by his behaviour. 'NGL why refund for the whole table… you enjoyed everything but the food — therefore food refund should be sufficient?' one person said. 'Refunding for the food is fair, but that's it,' another agreed. 'Love this guy, takes no shit s*** and has the heart of a lion,' another commented. PerthNow have reached out to Finns Beach Club for a comment about the incident.
Perth Now
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Tourist divides internet after demanding refund at Bali club
A tourist has filmed an argument with the security team at Bali's famous Finns Beach Club after allegedly finding hair in his food, but his entitled approach has divided opinions. Connor Jevons, from Liverpool in the UK, shared a video on TikTok at the weekend of the tense confrontation between him and the staff at the popular Canggu venue — which is owned by Australian property developer and former AFL player Tony Smith. In the video, the 26-year-old approaches staff demanding a reimbursement for his food. 'I need to speak with the owner, I have a situation that I need to sort,' Mr Jevons tells a lady at the front desk. After speaking to the manager he shows her a video he took the day before of his burger and fries being served to him at a poolside VIP table, zooming in on what he claims is a hair in his food. If you'd like to view this content, please adjust your . To find out more about how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Guide. 'I will not post this video as long as we sort this situation out,' he tells the manager. 'Did you request to replace the food?' the manager asked Mr Jevons. 'No, no because I was drunk... I didn't want to cause a problem, because you know sometimes when you're drunk you get aggressive,' Mr Jevons explains. He tells the manager that his table spent roughly 7.8 million Indonesian Rupiah, which is about $730 Australian dollars, adding that he has been to the venue on other occasions and spent similar amounts. 'So you want the money back for the food that you ordered?' the manager asks. 'I want all the money back, not just the food but for the whole night,' Mr Jevons responds. Mr Jevons got into a heated confrontation with the security team at Finns Beach Club. Credit: TikTok / ;@hugothemicro 'We can't do it,' the staff members says in regards to his refund request. Mr Jevons leaves his phone recording while more security staff surround the British tourist and ask him to leave. When Mr Jevons doesn't move, he is escorted out while he speaks to the camera in protest. 'People, this is what happens at Finns Beach Club. . . this is meant to be the 'world's best beach club',' he shouts. 'Everybody stop touching me,' he demands, while looking for his motorbike. 'I'm looking for my motorbike bro,' Mr Jevons repeats after a security guard pushes him away from the beach club. Mr Jevons continues to ask security for a refund, telling the guards about the following he has on TikTok. 'I will delete all of the footage if you give me my reimbursement,' he tells the security guards while they try to find his motorbike. Mr Jevons posted the video on his TikTok account, asking his 100,000 followers what their thoughts on the situation are. Over a million people have viewed the video and followers have replied with differing opinions, some applauding Mr Jevons and others unconvinced by his behaviour. 'NGL why refund for the whole table… you enjoyed everything but the food — therefore food refund should be sufficient?' one person said. 'Refunding for the food is fair, but that's it,' another agreed. 'Love this guy, takes no shit s*** and has the heart of a lion,' another commented. PerthNow have reached out to Finns Beach Club for a comment about the incident.
Axios
18-04-2025
- Business
- Axios
Making sense of venture capital's AI paradox
Early-stage venture deals keep getting bigger, even once stripping out AI juggernauts. And that raises a multi-billion dollar question: If AI is supposed to supercharge productivity, why are startups raising more money? Shouldn't they need less? By the numbers: Median early-stage round sizes are up year-over-year for most industry sectors, easily outpacing inflation, according to Q1 data compiled by PitchBook and provided to Axios. Not just in software, which includes many AI developers, but also in pharma/biotech (+29%), media (41%), IT hardware (71%), health-care systems (30.5%), and energy (79%). For PitchBook, "early-stage" means the company must be less than five years old and, if a series is specified, it should be an A or B. The best explanation for this disconnect may be that AI hype hasn't yet translated into a ton of actionable use cases. The top ones so far are coding assistance and customer service automation, both of which can drive down startup costs but aren't necessarily game-changers. This is far different than when cloud computing took hold, dramatically cutting startup costs for both equipment and real estate (and, arguably, leading to the NYC tech boom). There also are some real-world cost increases, like Bay Area housing, but VC round sizes are climbing at a much faster clip. The more cynical explanation may be that round size doesn't always match a startup's capital requirements. Venture capitalists often have their own calculus, tied to fund dynamics and ownership stake thresholds. Or the desire to use money as a competitive moat, particularly if they view a startup as operating in a winner-take-all market. Founders often lament taking more funding than they want, but either don't have better options or let future fundraising fears win out. Sometimes both sides are aligned on the gluttony, since larger checks can correspond to larger valuations. Finally, there's the academic explanation of Jevons paradox, formulated by a British economist 160 years ago, whereby increased efficiency can lead to increased consumption.
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
DeepSeek Doesn't Scare OpenAI, Thanks to the ‘Jevons Paradox'
Economic jargon is usually confined to textbooks and business school seminars. But every once in a while, something happens in the world that drives the lingo out of obscurity and into popular discussions. One such emergence happened late last month when, following a weekend of alarm over the viability of A.I. investments, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, told followers in a post on X: 'Jevons paradox strikes again! As A.I. gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.' The Jevons Paradox is named after the 19th-century economist and logician William Stanley Jevons. In his 1865 book, 'The Coal Question,' he noted that as engines improved and made coal more efficient — requiring less of the resource to produce the same amount of energy — demand for coal would actually increase, not decrease. In other words, he said, a drop in the cost of production often leads to greater production. Televised citations (and recitations) of Jevons took off on Monday Jan. 27, as the U.S. stock market was rattled. A Chinese artificial intelligence start-up, DeepSeek, became an overnight sensation when its app shot to the top of Apple's App Store following the release of its latest reasoning model. The Chinese company had created an A.I. tool with analytical capabilities rivaling those developed by Google and Microsoft's OpenAI. And, it appeared, the company had done it at a fraction of the cost. That sparked an 'oh, expletive' panic for U.S. investors who had been shoveling trillions of dollars into the megatech firms that were building and buying advanced U.S. chips for A.I. Nvidia — the center of the American A.I. universe, and the world's most valuable company — experienced a staggering one-day rout, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization. But wait a second, pump the brakes, said a counter-chorus of analysts and executives, echoing Mr. Nadella. Even if DeepSeek was as cheap as its coders claimed, they said, it could actually be a pleasant surprise, boosting demand for U.S. chips and A.I. products in general. Was Mr. Nadella's invocation of the paradox self-serving thinking? Yes. But the argument also has a decent track record, beyond coal. (Even though Jevons himself failed to predict how resource substitutes, like petroleum, would complicate demand for coal.) Computers, for example, were once the size of living rooms and far too expensive for the average person. When they shrunk in size and cost, thanks to more-efficient processing chips, personal computers became a staple in every home. Later, smartphones settled into every palm. A lot of tech companies that were big in the '80s were trounced. But the industry blossomed. The paradox has a darker side. Greater coal use gave us an early taste of modern comforts we now can't imagine living without (thank you, electricity). It also contributed greatly to global warming. Smartphones have made us more connected and productive, but also hopelessly addicted to mindless scrolling (and in some ways, lonelier). If these past Jevons paradoxes are any guide, greater A.I. use is sure to give us a similar mix of unforeseen marvels, and miseries.
Iraqi News
28-01-2025
- Business
- Iraqi News
DeepSeek breakthrough raises AI energy questions
Bangkok – Having shattered assumptions in the tech sector and beyond about the cost of artificial intelligence, Chinese startup DeepSeek's new chatbot is now roiling another industry: energy companies. The firm says it developed its open-source R1 model using around 2,000 Nvidia chips, just a fraction of the computing power generally thought necessary to train similar programmes. That has significant implications not only for the cost of developing AI, but also the energy for the data centres that are the beating heart of the growing industry. The AI revolution has come with assumptions that computing and energy needs will grow exponentially, resulting in massive tech investments in both data centres and the means to power them, bolstering energy stocks. Data centres house the high-performance servers and other hardware that make AI applications work. So might DeepSeek represent a less power-hungry way to advance AI? Investors seemed to think so, fleeing positions in US energy companies on Monday and helping drag down stock markets already battered by mass dumping of tech shares. Constellation Energy, which is planning to build significant energy capacity for AI, sank more than 20 percent. 'R1 illustrates the threat that computing efficiency gains pose to power generators,' wrote Travis Miller, a strategist covering energy and utilities for financial services firm Morningstar. 'We still believe data centers, reshoring, and the electrification theme will remain a tailwind,' he added. But 'market expectations went too far.' – Nuclear ambitions – In 2023 alone, Google, Microsoft and Amazon ploughed the equivalent of 0.5 percent of US GDP into data centres, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Data centres already account for around one percent of global electricity use, and a similar amount of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, the IEA says. Efficiency improvements have so far moderated consumption despite growth in data centre demand. But the IEA projects global electricity use by data centres could double from 2022 figures by next year, to around Japan's annual consumption. That growing demand is unevenly spread. Data centres accounted for about 4.4 percent of US electricity consumption in 2023, a figure that could reach up to 12 percent by 2028, according to a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy. Last year, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all made deals for nuclear energy, either from so-called Small Modular Reactors or existing facilities. Meta meanwhile has signed contracts for renewable energy and announced it is seeking proposals for nuclear energy supplies. For now though, data centres generally rely on electricity grids that are often heavily dependent on fossil fuels. – 'Jevons paradox strikes again!' – Data centres also suck up significant amounts of water, both indirectly due to the water involved in electricity generation, and directly for use in cooling systems. 'Building data centres requires lots of carbon in the production of steel and also lots of carbon-intensive mining and production processes for creating the computing hardware to fill them,' said Andrew Lensen, senior lecturer in artificial intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington. 'So if DeepSeek was to replace models like OpenAI's… there would be a net decrease in energy requirements.' However, increasing efficiency in technology often simply results in increased demand — a proposition known as the Jevons paradox. 'Jevons paradox strikes again!' Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote on X on Monday. 'As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of,' he added. Lensen also pointed out that DeepSeek uses a 'chain-of-thought' model that is more energy-intensive than alternatives because it uses multiple steps to answer a query. These were previously too expensive to run, but could now become more popular because of efficiencies. Lensen said DeepSeek's impact might be to help US companies learn 'how they can use the computational efficiencies to build even larger and more performant models'. 'Instead of making their model 10 times smaller and efficient with the same level of performance, I think they'll use the new findings to make their model more capable at the same energy usage.'
