It'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.
How many critical “parental decisions” have you made in the past week? Probably very few (if any), but surely you did a lot of reinforcement of prior decisions that had already been made, enforcing rules that were already set, making sure things that were scheduled were completed, etc.
Important jobs don’t always mean constantly making important decisions. Following through and executing on things after they’re decided is the hard part.
See also: diet and exercise
This is hard to automatize.
Sneers aside, I think one common mis-assumption is that the difficulty of automating a task depends on how difficult it feels to humans. My hinge is that it mostly depends on the availability of training data. That would mean that all the public-facing aspects of being a CEO should by definition be easy to automate, while all the non-public stuff (also a pretty important part of being a CEO, I'd assume) should be hard.
edit: I see we're actually in agreement, sorry, I read the indentation level wrong.
Does that include all overheads such as HR, payroll, etc?
That said, the trade-off is that you're basically hiring consultants since they really work for OpenAI :)
But you are not getting a PhD worker for 20K with "AI", that's just marketing.
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....
Do they really get paid that much these days?
But it is true that in Europe, Switzerland PhDs (and professors too) make most. Not just ETH/EPFL as well. UZH (Uni Zurich) has salaries of 50K CHF per year for PhD candidates (with increments every year) -- that's almost 60K USD by your fourth year. This is also true for other universities. And while Zürich is expensive, it is not _that_ expensive.
You can reliably assume that PhD wages must eventually converge to the rent of a studio apartment nearby + a little bit (which may or may not be enough to cover all other expenses. Going into debt is common.)
Computer science is rate 5, so 73kCHF the first year, 78kCHF the second, then 83kCHF onwards.
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.
Hah! Checkmate AI, that's something you can't do! :D
2. How many such PhD people can it do the work of?
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.