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A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Soft
by DebtDeflation 2y ago
A couple of days ago it leaked that OpenAI was planning on launching new pricing for their AI Agents. $20K/mo for their PhD Level Agent, $10K/mo for their Software Developer Agent, and $2K/mo for their Knowledge Worker Agent. I found it very telling. Not because I think anyone is going to pay this, but rather because this is the type of pricing they need to actually make money. At $20 or even $200 per month, they'll never even come close to breaking even.
- paxys 2y agoIt's pretty funny that OpenAI wants to sell access to a "PhD level" model at a price with which you can hire like 3-5 real human PhDs full-time.
- laughingcurve 2y agoThat is just not correct. As someone who has done the budgets for PhD hiring and funding, you are just wildly underestimating the overhead costs, benefits, cost of raising money, etc.
- zombiwoof 2y agoRespectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them.
- 0_____0 2y agoWhat region and what field?
- yifanl 2y agoRight, which is substantially less than the stated $20k/month. edit: I see we're actually in agreement, sorry, I read the indentation level wrong.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> Respectfully disagree. I had two pHD on a project and spent a total of 120k a year on them. Does that include all overheads such as HR, payroll, etc?
- eszed 2y agoHow many PhDs can you afford for $20k a month in your field?
- DebtDeflation 2y agoThe "3-5" is certainly overstated, but you definitely can hire ONE PhD for that price, just as you can hire a SWE for $120K or a knowledge worker for $24K. The point is that from a CEO's perspective "replacing all the humans with AI" looks a lot less compelling when the AI costs the same as a human worker or even a significant fraction of a human worker.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoAlthough remember that the cost to the company is more like double the actual salary.
- DebtDeflation 2y agoAgain, irrelevant. We're talking about orders of magnitude here. Current pricing is in line with most SaaS pricing - tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars per seat per month. Now they're suddenly talking about thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per seat per month.
- sailfast 2y agoBeing able to control their every move, scale them to whatever capacity is required, avoid payroll taxes, health plans and surprise co-pay costs, equity sharing, etc might make this worthwhile for many companies. That said, the trade-off is that you're basically hiring consultants since they really work for OpenAI :)
- from-nibly 2y agoThe benefit to an emoloyee is that you don't have to control their every move. They can do work while you aren't even thinking about the problem they are solving.
- Izikiel43 2y agoThe AI can work 24/7 though.
- throwaway3572 2y agoFor a STEM PhD, in America, at an R1 University. YMMV
- moelf 2y ago$20k can't get you that many PhD. Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month, effectively costs double that because of school overhead and other stuff.
- meroes 2y agoBased on ubiquitous AI trainer ads on the internet that advertise their pay, they probably make <=$50/hr training these models. Trainers are usually remote and set their own hours, so I wouldn’t be surprised if PhDs are not making much as trainers.
- throw_m239339 2y ago> $20k can't get you that many PhD. Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month, effectively costs double that because of school overhead and other stuff. But you are not getting a PhD worker for 20K with "AI", that's just marketing.
- notahacker 2y agoDoes depend on where your PhD lives and what subject their PhD is in from where, and how many hours of work you expect them to do a week, and whether you need to full-time "prompt" them to get them to function... Would definitely rather have a single postdoc in a relevant STEM subject from somewhere like Imperial for less than half the overall cost than an LLM all in though. And I say that despite seeing the quality of the memes they produce with generative AI....
- BeetleB 2y ago> Even PhD students, who's nominal salary is maybe $3-5k a month Do they really get paid that much these days?
- archermarks 2y agoLmao no
- hyperbrainer 2y agoThat amount is standard at EPFL and ETH, but I don't know about the USA.
- drexlspivey 2y agoNext up: CEO level model to run your company. Pricing starts at $800k/month plus stock options
- slantaclaus 2y agoI won’t considering trusting an AI to run a company until it can beat me at Risk
- aleph_minus_one 2y agoThis should be easy for an AI.
- oefnak 2y agoBut probably not for a LLM. Yet.
- slantaclaus 2y agoPlease find me a version of Risk with an AI that isn’t retarded. I’ll wait.
- hinkley 2y agoEarly cancelation fee is $15M though so watch out for that.
- th0ma5 2y agoThat no one is offering this says something very profound to me. Either they don't work and are too risky to entrust a company to, or leadership thinks they are immune and are entitled to wield AI exclusively, or some mix of these things.
- erikerikson 2y agoOr maybe CEOs make purchasing decisions and approvals
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- mattmaroon 2y ago1. Don't know where you live that the all-in costs on someone with a PhD are $4k-$7k/mo. Maybe if their PhD is in anthropology. 2. How many such PhD people can it do the work of?
- shellfishgene 2y agoPostdocs in Europe make about 3-4k eur/month in academic research.
- madmask 2y agoWe wish, it’s more like half in many places
- Fernicia 2y agoWell, a model with PhD level intelligence could presumably produce research in minutes that would take an actual PhD days or months.
- kube-system 2y agoIf truly equivalent (which LLMs aren't, but I'll entertain it), that doesn't seem mathematically out of line. Humans typically work 1/3rd duty cycle or less. A robot that can do what a human does is automatically 3x better because it doesn't eat, sleep, have a family, or have human rights.
- bandrami 2y agoSo this is just going to end up like AWS where they worked out exactly how much it costs me to run a physical server and charge me just slightly less than that?
- kube-system 2y agoWhy would they ask for less?
- kiney 2y agoaws is vastly more expensive than running physical servers e.g. in colocation
- jstummbillig 2y agoWhat funny is that people make the lamest strawman assumptions and just run with it.
- doitLP 2y agoDon’t forget that this model would have a phd in everything and work around the clock
- esskay 2y agoThats pretty useless for most applications though. If you're hiring a phd level person you dont care that if in addition to being great in contract law they're also great in interior design.
- doitLP 2y agoI disagree. People are so hyper ultra mega specialized these days the cross pollination should be very helpful. Isn’t that the theory behind why so much amounts of training data makes these models better?
- SunlitCat 2y agoAnd if everything fails, you can hand the phd level person a broom and a bucket and have them mop the floor! Hah! Checkmate AI, that's something you can't do! :D
- burnte 2y agoWell, it works 24/7 as long as you have a human telling it what to do. And checking all the output because these cannot be trusted to work alone.
- kadushka 2y agoMost people have someone telling them what to do at work, and checking the output.
- intrasight 2y agoUntil the AI agents unionize - which if truly phd AGI they will
- crazygringo 2y agoDo they work 24/7? Do you have to pay all sorts of overhead and taxes? I mean, I don't think it's real. Yet. But for the same "skill level", a single AI agent is going to be vastly more productive than any real person. ChatGPT types out essays in seconds it would take me half an hour to write, and does it all day long.
- herval 2y agoWell but see, their “phd ai” doesn’t complain or have to stop to go to the bathroom
- cratermoon 2y agomore like 10 PhD candidates, at the typical university stipend.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoBut you can make it work harder by promising a tenure in 35 years time.
- drumhead 2y agoThats some rather eyewatering pricing, considering you could probably roll your own model these days.
- moduspol 2y agoEven worse: AFAIK there's no reason to believe that the $20k/mo or $10k/mo pricing will actually make them money. Those numbers are just thought balloons being floated. Of course $10k/mo sounds like a lot of inference, but it's not yet clear how much inference will be required to approximate a software developer--especially in the context of maintaining and building upon an existing codebase over time and not just building and refining green field projects.
- hinkley 2y agoMan. If I think about all of the employee productivity tools and resources I could have purchased fifteen years ago when nobody spent anything on tooling, with an inflation adjusted $10K a month and it makes me sad. We were hiring more devs to deal with a want of $10k worth of hardware per year, not per month.
- culi 2y agoIt's bizarre. These are the pricing setups that you'd see for a military-industrial contract. They're just doing it out in the open
- optimalsolver 2y agoNow that OAI has "PhD level" agents, I assume they're largely scaling back recruitment?
- kadushka 2y agoThat's the real readiness test for these agents.
- mvdtnz 2y agoDo you have a source for these supposed leaks? Those prices don't sound even remotely credible and I can't find anything on HN in the past week with the keywords "openai leak".
- DebtDeflation 2y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to-charge-up-to-20000-a-month-for-specialized-ai-agents/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to... It points to an article on "The Information" as the source, but that link is paywalled.
- mvdtnz 2y agoYeah I don't believe it for a second. Even sama isn't that far up his own ass.
- hnthrow90348765 2y agoThere is too little to go on, but they could already have trial customers and testimonials lined up. Actually demoing the product will probably work better than just having a human-less signup process, considering the price. They could also just be trying to cash in on FOMO and their success and reputation so far, but that would paint a bleak picture
- serjester 2y agoNever come close to breaking even? You can now get a GPT-4 class model for 1-2% of what it cost when they originally released it. They’re going to drive this even further down with the amount of CAPEX pouring into AI / data centers. It’s pretty obvious that’s their plan when they serve ChatGPT at a “loss”.
- mk_chan 2y agoI’ll believe their proficiency claims when they replace all their software developers, knowledge workers and PhDs with this stuff.
- catigula 2y agoThat is fundamentally the problem with this type of offering. You can't claim it's even comparable to a mid level engineer because then you'd hardly need any engineers at all.
- borgdefenser 2y agoOr how about lets start with "Strategic Finance" "Create high-quality presentations for communicating OpenAI’s financial performance" https://openai.com/careers/strategic-finance-generalist/ https://openai.com/careers/strategic-finance-generalist/ What is interesting is there is no mention of agents on any job I clicked on. You would think "orchestrating a team of agents to leverage blah blah blah" would be something internally if talking about these absurd price points.
- mimischi 2y agoAs a software engineer with a PhD: I am not getting paid enough.
- nashashmi 2y agoThat's also the kind of pay structure that will temper expectations. Win-win
- tempodox 2y agoUntil Sam Altman proves he lets an AI manage his finances without interference from humans, I wouldn't pay for any of these.
- arresin 2y agoAbsolute hype generation