Do you mean an AI programmer would cost $500k per year? If so I think you greatly overestimate the cost.
Recently I did some text processing with GPT-4 turbo (128k context) and I reached the daily limit of 5 million tokens. IIRC it cost me around $70 bucks for the day.
I think $70 is the hourly rate of a SE with $150k salary working 40 hours per week. Note that we are at early stages with this tech, it will probably only get cheaper from here.
Sure, for you that was the price. Enterprise cost would be way different.
"Note that we are at early stages with this tech, it will probably only get cheaper from here."
Haha people who pay for these ai tools can only hope...Ask any cloud provider, streaming service, or utility company if their prices are cheaper now than before.
As these ai tools get better, they will require more resources to run (according to altman's 7 trillion dollar request) and most likely drive up the costs.
But hopefully you are right though, as i believe we as humanity would be best served spending as little money and resources as possible on AI.
I suspect you underestimate it. Raw engine cost is one thing; what businesses downstream will actually pay, is another. Look at AWS: a lot of businesses don't even touch it directly, their vendor ISPs do. If "AIDev" really becomes a thing, businesses will buy specialized services (e.g. "ApiBuilder.io", "YAMLCrusher.io", etc etc), which will obviously command a premium on top of top-tier, 5-9s guaranteed, "raw" ml engines.