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OpenAI Plots Charging $20k a Month for PhD-Level Agents
- johntitorjr 2y agoMaybe this will drive up the value of human PhD labor - $240k/year is a lot!
- jltsiren 2y agoIt depends. 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.
- dsign 2y agoThis. 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...
- blueplanet200 2y agoDoubt it. Increasing the supply of anything rarely results in the price going up.
- techpineapple 2y agoWhy are phd-level-agents paid twice as much software developers? Why don’t we see similar value in the real world? $2,000 for high income knowledge workers? None of these numbers make sense. 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.
- turnsout 2y agoI'm bullish on agents, but I do wonder what this agent could possibly be doing to justify a $240k salary, which is around market rate for a CEO at an SMB. 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.
- dtagames 2y agoIt's nowhere near CEO pay for a tech company, but it is right at what those companies pay for PhD ML experts and also what they pay for the top end of software dev jobs.
- noobermin 2y agoSMB is small to medium sized business. May be in places other than the US.
- croes 2y agoBut this experts would be liable for their mistakes. Who takes the liability for the agent’s mistakes and hallucinations?
- cowboylowrez 2y agoI'll tell you who will be liable for AI's mistakes. The crickets. Yes, the crickets you hear every time this question is asked. We must punish the crickets severely and we will, trust me!
- serjester 2y agoWho knows if this leak is credible, but typical SaaS pricing dictates you should be charging 10 - 25% of the value you bring. That implies this agent is expected to deliver 1 - 2M+ of value, essentially replacing a medium size team of knowledge workers. Even as an AI bull, this level of capability seems far fetched.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoAre the laws and lessons we've learned in the past still relevant in this nascent age of open grift?
- jmpman 2y agoI used to work on storage software pricing. We would charge 60% of the value it would bring our customer - based off of the classic behavioral game theory experiment, Dollar Auction. Our customers surprisingly didn’t object.
- supermatt 2y agoHow did you calculate value - if it's based on savings over traditional storage, wouldn't the profit also be capped by the same amount?
- jmpman 2y agoThis was an OEM storage offering back when we sold hard drives. We found a software improvement to our storage arrays which resulted in the customer needing fewer drives. Let’s say that instead of them needing 100 drives, with the software, they only needed 90 drives. So, we would sell them the 90 drives, and a software feature key that cost the equivalent of 6 drives.
- adammarples 2y agoHow is the dollar auction remotely a model for bidding on software and how did it help you arrive at 60%?
- juped 2y agoSad and pathetic if true. How unsustainable is their capital structure, exactly? Worse than I naively suspected, I suppose?
- jamesy0ung 2y agoOpenAI is a financial black hole, burning cash faster than it can raise it, with a business model built on hype and a product (ChatGPT) that's easily commoditized. Their revenue projections are delusional, and the core API business is surprisingly weak, suggesting the entire generative AI market might be overblown. https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
- acchow 2y agoWe're in the early days, like back when Uber offered $2.50 rides anywhere in San Francisco. They burned through tons of cash for years but had $9.8bn net income last year.
- namaria 2y agoWould uber then drop you off in a random address sometimes? 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?
- fairestvalue 2y agoUber and Lyft are literally the textbook examples of (local) network effects. OpenAI is not.
- rs186 2y agoAt least I trust Uber enough that I use it anywhere I don't get to drive my own car. And I have never been in an accident so far. 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.
- alberth 2y agoCorrect me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t this single PhD-level agent be able to be used by everyone in your company. Paying $240k/year for company-wide access (if you’re a Fortune 500 company), isn’t bad.
- pyuser583 2y agoThis is why the price is so high. It isn’t just a person at a desk. It’s a service anyone can access. It also never calls in sick or sexually harasses an intern.
- croes 2y agoThat person would be liable for their mistakes. Who is liable for the agent’s mistakes.
- koshergweilo 2y agoResponsible, maybe, but Liable? I don't think so. So long as you genuinely try to do your best and don't break the law, the a company can do is fire you.
- croes 2y agoThe AI agent could break the law. But even if they don't, who is responsible for the mistakes. What if an error leads to people getting hurt?
- fennecfoxy 2y agoWell that's what c levels are supposedly for, but all they ever get is golden handshakes and parachute off to the next company to cause problems at.
- maxglute 2y agoAI agent going to be the keener that works 24/7 365 while humans check the work andtake the blame.
- alok-g 2y ago
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoI have a feeling they will try more and more outrageous experiments to somehow get some money
- _mitterpach 2y agoNote that OpenAI is notoriously terrible at pricing. Their prices are based on gut-feel and marketing, more than being priced on what customers would pay and what is profitable. 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.
- imtringued 2y agoDoes anyone else get the feeling that OpenAI's PhD-Level Agents will secretly be powered by underpaid PhDs?
- torginus 2y agoMy question here is if they do bring to market what they claim, as in AI fully capable of replacing humans, what's stopping them of just simply cloning the business model of every company running on knowledge work, and not even bothering to lease out these AI employees?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hypercube33 2y agoIn a gold rush you'll make money selling shovels as the saying goes
- nullbyte808 2y agoPhD level knowledge with the reasoning ability of a mentally challenged 8-year-old. lmao