Morgan Stanley: Open-Weight Models Lower AI Costs, and the "Jevons Paradox" May Sustain Growing Compute Demand

Odaily Planet Daily News Morgan Stanley pointed out in its latest report "Open-Weight Models and Three Future Scenarios" that open-weight models do not necessarily weaken AI compute demand. On the contrary, lower usage costs may accelerate AI adoption, creating a classic "Jevons Paradox": as the cost of a single inference decreases, companies will apply AI to more tasks, ultimately driving up total demand for tokens, compute, electricity, and infrastructure. The report emphasized that open weights do not mean entirely free—enterprises still need to bear costs such as GPU, cloud services, operations and maintenance, and security, and the actual economics depend on the application scenario. Morgan Stanley believes that regardless of how the level of model openness changes, companies like Nvidia are expected to benefit.