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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

I'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.

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I could see paying this to have one super intelligence on staff at a large company but that isn't what these models are yet.

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.

It'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.

SMB is small to medium sized business. May be in places other than the US.

But this experts would be liable for their mistakes.

Who takes the liability for the agent’s mistakes and hallucinations?

I'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!

> it is right at what those companies pay for PhD ML experts

Where can one hire PhD ML experts for $240k?

France, the Netherlands, Sweden, probably China too. Also places like Russia, Armenia and so on.

I think you can PhD ML experts in Sweden for substantially below 240k, maybe even as little as 124k.

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