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As a TCS assistant professor from Eastern Europe, I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long th
by NotOscarWilde 5mo ago
As a TCS assistant professor from Eastern Europe, I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long thinking models.
Paying for Pro from any of my current academic budgets is completely ouf of the field of reality here -- all budgets tend to have restricted uses and software payments fit into very few categories. Effectively, I'd have to ask for a brand new grant and hope the grant rules allow for large software payments and I won't encounter an anti-AI reviewer; such a thing would take one year at least.
As a nail to the coffin, I was "denied" all Claude Opus recently as part of Microsoft's clampdown on individual (and academic) use of Copilot.
(Chagpt 5.5 Plus does not seem sufficient for any deeper investigations into new research topics, I've tried.)
Apologies for the rant.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago[flagged]
- bananaflag 5mo agoFor a TCS assistant professor in Eastern Europe, $200/month would be 20% of their salary. And the situation is better, ten years ago it would have been 80%.
- xanrah 5mo agoLots of people in the west can’t afford 200 a month. How rich are you?
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThat’s what most people spend on their phone and Internet connections per month in the US. That’s what the average American family spends on just five days of food.
- fuzzy2 5mo agoYes and? That's money that is already allocated. It cannot be spent on something else.
- xmprt 5mo agoNo you don't get it. If the family just starved for 5 days then they could increase revenue for these AI companies.
- sevg 5mo agoYou can afford five days of food, so that must mean you can also afford a Claude Max plan? What kind of logic is this?
- xanrah 5mo ago37% of Americans would be unable to cover a 400 usd unexpected expense* without using one or more credit cards. 13% would flat out be unable to cover it. [1] Are you honestly saying most families would be able to justify 200 usd a month for ChatGPT? https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-savings-and-investments.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
- skrebbel 5mo agoFwiw your comments here read to me as “I’m super rich and everyone I know is super rich too, and I can’t imagine that anyone isn’t”.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoPeople spend much more than that on just commuting to work if you can spend $200 a month to supercharge what you do at work and 1000x your productivity it’s a no-brainer.
- skrebbel 5mo agoFrom what money? Just pause the health insurance for a while? Stop paying the rent? No diapers for the kid? Your entire story only makes sense if you have many hundreds of dollars/euros of entirely disposable income every month left, after all unavoidable expenses have been paid for. I understand that this holds for you and everyone you know but I’d like you to appreciate that for very many people it doesn’t.
- gapan 5mo agoSo, should they stop commuting to work to afford their AI subscription? Or perhaps just don't eat anything for 5 days a month?
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- NotOscarWilde 5mo agoThere is a significant gap between what academics are paid across European countries, and since most top universities here are public institutions, you are right -- Eastern European government employees tend to be on the poorer side. There are several other philosophical arguments against what you propose but I do not wish to go down that route.
- skullone 5mo agoBruh, $200/m for most people in the US is also a hard "no!". That's a lot of money. Plus Anthropic isn't doing good deals with orgs that spend less than 250k a month. It's ridiculous.
- iammrpayments 5mo agoAverage European salary is around $4000/month, in eastern Europe is half of that. Median is probably lower than that. Makes me want to quit visiting places like reddit where everybody claims to be making 100k+/year
- goobatrooba 5mo agoAll salary discussions need a cost of living context. Yes in Europe you earn a bit less but the public services are much better than in the US and one emergency (r.g. healthcare) won't ruin you as it's mostly a public system. I'll take a Euro salary and qualify life over a FIRE-typs salary and daily fear of falling into the abyss any day.
- revolvingthrow 5mo agoGiven the topic and the fact llm providers charge global rates, the absolute take-home money is much more relevant. Even if you live like a king on $1000/mo, 5.5 pro is still $200.
- fakedang 5mo agoTheir loss if they don't move to regional pricing. AI will continue to remain an upper-management luxury then, and won't reach the mass adoption required to justify their outsized valuations.
- revolvingthrow 5mo agoRegional pricing makes sense for products that don’t have ongoing costs or where most of the input cost can be offset by local labor. You’re not buying server racks nor electricity at 1/3 of the price to serve poorer markets
- teiferer 5mo agoAI pricing is not mainly about cost, it's about market realities, i.e., charging exactly the sweet spot to maximize profit.
- alsetmusic 5mo agoIt’s a classic example of the best positioned people being in the best position to keep reaping all the rewards. There’s the example of a poor person and a rich person buying boots. The poor person’s boots wear out and have to be replaced while the rich persons boots last for many years due to higher quality craftsmanship. Over years, the poor person’s boots wear will pay may for boots.
- huijzer 5mo agoI know the example, but as a counter-argument: often more expensive boots are not more durable. It’s about spending time to learn to spot the quality. Of course if you are really poor, then you have to take expensive shortcuts, but for most people that shouldn’t be the case. Learning to do more with less money isn’t as bad as many people think. It’s also good for the brain to be a bit more creative.
- NotOscarWilde 5mo ago> Learning to do more with less money isn’t as bad as many people think. We are wading into philosophy here, but I believe this analogy doesn't track in this case -- my suspicion from this blog post and others is that already today, the Pro level thinking models are a positive multiplier to your research output similar to how the models one level lower are a multiplier to one's programming output. Maybe one can someday use the cheaper models similar to how you can use cheaper models than Opus/5.5 and still be nearly as productive as a programmer -- but I am trying and failing doing exactly that for research questions.
- huijzer 5mo ago> the Pro level thinking models are a positive multiplier to your research output I have left academia after my PhD and can tell you the analogy still works. I’m much happier now I left the academia rat race
- m_mueller 5mo agohere I think it's less about "poverty" (non-US acedemic budgets are still high, though not in the same sphere), but it's about having red tape when it comes to software. My experience doing a PhD in Japan was: Everything you can touch was basically a free for all - including $500 keyboards and $10k Mac Pros, especially if you are a valued researcher. But software, oh man, how can we prove receipt of goods to accounting...
- vthallam 5mo ago@NotOscarWilde drop your email here, I will reach out and happy to get you a pro account for a few months so you can try 5.5 pro.(work at OAI)
- thierrydamiba 5mo agoShoutout to you-I will match it if they need other resources. (I don’t work at OAI, just think this is cool)
- alsetmusic 5mo agoYou know what, I'm ashamed that I didn't think of this. I'll sponsor three months. Email in my hn profile. I don't understand the math in the article, but I'd love to help you make progress in it.
- fragmede 5mo agosame.
- NotOscarWilde 5mo agoI will leave the contact up for a bit longer if people want to get in touch and share their experience with the research gap of the models -- or anything, really -- but I do not think there is any need of further support. Like I said elsewhere, the offer of support made my day and the gesture is enough. Thank you.
- NotOscarWilde 5mo agoThis requires a major "dox" of myself, but I am really grateful for the offer, so these are my academic contacts: https://pastebin.com/hNYrCjhL https://pastebin.com/hNYrCjhL I probably will erase the contents in a few days. Even if you just drop an email and it doesn't work out, I appreciate this gesture so much. Thank you.
- vthallam 5mo ago
- qq66 5mo agoPaste what you want me to ask 5.5 Pro and I'll paste you the response.
- ziotom78 5mo agoI fully understand your rant! I pay ~20€/month for the Pro account, as my university has a deal with Microsoft and only seems to recognize Copilot, so it’s very hard to use one own’s funding for paying something else.
- johndough 5mo agoAt my university, everyone had to pay their AI subscriptions out of their own pocket, until a communal AI service was introduced recently. It took 2 years to set up and only serves gpt-oss-120b, so everyone is still using other services. But at least some admin can scatter the word "AI" all over the university's website now and has an excuse to reject any requests for AI subscriptions because "we already have AI".
- bambax 5mo agoOpenRouter lets you pay by the token only (no subscription), has all the frontier models (including Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5) and most of the others, and if you use it sparingly it usually turns out to be quite cheap.
- johndough 5mo agoAPI pricing for Claude is about an order of magnitude more expensive than subscriptions (numbers: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits https://she-llac.com/claude-limits). But it may be worth it with DeepSeek V4 Pro, which is currently on discount.
- bambax 5mo agoDepends very much on usage! If you connect it to tools like Cursor, etc. then yes a subscription is probably cheaper -- although, you'd have to subscribe to each provider if you want to use them all. But if you ask questions occasionally, (and don't resend, for example, your whole codebase with each request), then the API feels really cheap, even for the frontier models.
- tasuki 5mo agoMy problem with pay-by-the-token is that it discourages me using the thing ("oh the prompt will cost me $0.1"), so I pay a subscription which I'm pretty sure costs me about two-three times what I'd pay just for the api costs, but encourages me to use it more ("oh I have a subscription already, better make use of it").
- nerdsniper 5mo agoI believe ChatGPT 5.5 Pro access is available for $100/month, is that an unrealistic level of expense for someone in your position and geography? Even if the university won't pay for it, it seems you'd like to use this tool for your own goals. I'm not trying to shame here, just curious whether this is completely unattainable for most researchers in your area.
- Computer0 5mo agoIt appears that in their country someone in their position makes about 50k usd annually. I make a similar amount in my country and cannot justify it.
- iberator 5mo agoIts good. You should work hard if you are in the public sector! Using claude (cheating) and getting check from government is unethical
- bwfan123 5mo ago> I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long thinking models I am starting to see folks saying - ok, so LLMs can do this, what value have you added ? modulo llm is becoming the norm.