From $20 a Month to $20K a Month. Great Idea… or Not?
March 10, 2025
Another post from the dinobaby. Alas, no smart software used for this essay.
OpenAI was one of many smart software companies. If you meet the people on my team, you will learn that I dismissed most of the outfits as search-and-retrieval outfits looking for an edge. Search definitely needs an edge, but I was not confident that predictive generation of an “answer” was a solution. It was a nifty party trick, but then the money started flowing. In January 2023, Microsoft put Google’s cute sharp teeth on edge. Suddenly AI or smart software was the next big thing. The virtual reality thing did not ring the bell. The increasingly weird fiddling with mobile phones did not get the brass ring. And the idea of Apple becoming the next big thing in chips has left everyone confused. My M1 devices work pretty well, and unless I look at the label on the gizmos I can tell an M1 from and M3. Do I care? Nope.
But OpenAI became news. It squabbled with the mastermind of “renewable” satellites, definitely weird trucks, and digging tunnels in Las Vegas. (Yeah, nice idea, just not for anyone who does not want to get stalled in traffic.) When ChatGPT became available, one of those laboring in my digital vineyards signed me up. I fiddled with it and decided that I would run some of my research through the system. I learned that my research was not in the OpenAI “system.” I had it do some images. Those sucked. I will cancel this week.
I put in my AI folder this article “OpenAI’s is Getting Ready to Release PhD Level AI Agents.” I was engaging in some winnowing and I scanned it. In early February 2025, Digital Marketing News wrote about PhD level agents. I am not a PhD. I quite before I finished my dissertation to work in the really socially conscious nuclear unit of that lovable outfit Halliburton. You know the company. That’s the one that charged about $950.00 for a gallon of fuel during the Iraq war. You will also associate Dick Cheney, a fun person, with the company. So no PhD for me.
I was skeptical because of the dismal performance of ChatGPT 4, oh, whatever, trying to come up with the information I have assembled for my new book for law enforcement professionals. Then I read a Slashdot post with the title “OpenAI Plots Charging $20,000 a Month For PhD-Level Agents” shared from a publication I don’t know much about. I think it is like 404 or a for-fee Substack. The publication has great content, and you have to pay for it.
Be that as it may, the Slashdot post reports or recycles information that suggests the fee per month for a PhD level version of OpenAI’s smart software will be a modest $20,000 a month. I think the service one of my team registered costs $20.00 per month. What’s with the 20s? Twenty is a pronic number; that is, it can be slapped on a high school math test so students can say it is the product of two consecutive integers. In college I knew a person who was a numerologist. I recall that the meaning of 20 was cooperation.
The interesting part of the Slashdot post was the comments. I scanned them and concluded that some of the commenters saw the high-end service killing jobs for high-end programmers and consultants. Yeah, maybe. Somehow I doubt that a code base that struggles with information related to a widely-used messaging application is suddenly going to replicate the information I have obtained from my sources in Eastern Europe seems a bit of stretch. Heck, ChatGPT could barely do English. Russian? Not a change, but who knows. And for $200,000 it is not likely this dinobaby will take what seems like unappetizing bait.
One commenter allegedly named TheGreatEmu said:
I was about to make a similar comment, but the cost still doesn’t add up. I’m at a national lab with generally much higher overheads than most places, and a postdoc runs us $160k/year fully burdened. And of course the AI sure as h#ll can’t connect cables, turn knobs, solder, titrate, use a drill press, clean, chat with the machinist who doesn’t use email, sneaker net data out of the air-gapped lab, or understand napkin drawings over beer where all real science gets done. Or do anything useful with information that isn’t already present in the training data, and if you’re not pushing past existing knowledge boundaries, you’re not really doing science are you?
My hunch is that this is a PR or marketing play. Let’s face it. With Microsoft cutting off data center builds and Google floundering with cheese, the smart software revolution is muddling forward. The wins are targeted applications in quite specific domains. Yes, gentle reader, that’s why people pay for Chemical Abstracts online. The information is not on the public Internet. The American Chemical Society has information that the super capable AI outfits have not figured as something the non-computational, organic, or inorganic chemist will use from a somewhat volatile outfit. Get something wrong in a nuclear lab and smart software won’t be too helpful if it hallucinates.
Net net: Is everything marketing? At age 80, my answer is, “Absolutely.” Sam AI-Thinks in terms of trillions. Is $20 trillion the next pricing level?
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2025
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