OpenAI Plots Charging $20k a Month for PhD-Level Agents
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
Paying $240k/year for company-wide access (if you’re a Fortune 500 company), isn’t bad.
It also never calls in sick or sexually harasses an intern.
Who is liable for the agent’s mistakes.
But even if they don't, who is responsible for the mistakes. What if an error leads to people getting hurt?
Also I don’t really have any intuitive sense of what a phd-level agent would be, the cynical part of me thinks it is a marketing term because people mentally associate one with smart.
It would need to be generating leads and closing sales, or doing the day-to-day work of at least 3 people.
This would have to be backed by something 10X better than the current SOTA models.
Who takes the liability for the agent’s mistakes and hallucinations?
Where can one hire PhD ML experts for $240k?
I think you can PhD ML experts in Sweden for substantially below 240k, maybe even as little as 124k.
Most business tasks and problems you certainly don't need a PhD to solve. Even if you could hire human PhDs at min wage I don't see how most businesses can even leverage that.
If all bank tellers had PhDs in quant finance it would change basically nothing.
Or, maybe worse, would someone be able to make your uber drop you off at their place by sending the driver an sms before you even started the ride?
OpenAI is not.
I don't trust ChatGPT enough to copy its output and be done with my work. Sometimes I spend more time prompting + revising the response than writing it myself from scratch. It's like Uber is so bad that it is faster to walk than getting matched to a driver who very slowly drives to the destination. And yet you get into a car crash during your trip. I doubt Uber would still be in business today.
Like Uber I suspect their business model is simply to capex until all their enemies are dead, then jack up prices.
Building on top of this would be a terrible idea. The bubble is going to burst, OpenAI will stop getting investment money and will need to actually start being, you know, profitable. They will do that by milking all their actual existing customers - expect price to at least double in the following years.
If you want to hire a mid-career PhD in a field that has a real job market outside the academia, and the person already has a stable job they are content with, $240k might not be enough. At least unless the job is particularly interesting.
And the total cost of employment is obviously higher than the nominal salary. (Which is mostly a convenient lie for tax purposes.) If the total cost including benefits, employer-paid taxes, and mandatory insurance is $240k/year, the nominal salary could be $180k or even lower.
In many places of Europe, for example, the salary after taxes and mandatory employer contributions become between 30% and 40% of what the employer disburses. The employee is aware that his 20k raise will become more like 6k, and it's in many cases not worth the increase in responsibility, workload or inconvenience. So employee is more likely to seek fulfillment, economical or otherwise, by other means.
But this means that in a few years, people earning 80k per year will be working under the supervision of an AI earning 240k per year. In my sci-fi books, I was leaving that for the 2040s...