> OpenAI reportedly discussed charging $20k/month on PhD-level research agents with investors.

At this price point, it will be cheaper to hire a bunch of actual PhDs. The vast majority who will not earn anything close to 250k per year in most of the world.

I also seriously question what even does PhD-level mean in the context of a model? Someone with a PhD has developed a very deep but narrow knowledge of a particular domain and has contributed to at least pushing out our sphere of knowledge a tiny bit in that pillar of competency. A model is a best a brittle, fractured and often inconsistent representation of written human knowledge and lacks most basic intuitive grounding in the world due to the lack of embodiment.

In my experience, to safely get any value out of an LLM, you have to be more knowledgeable than the LLM on a topic. So in this case, you'd really need a PhD to use this tool, so at best its a $20k a month research aid, which honestly is far more expensive than a handful of grad students, and probably less effective.

Yes, but I suspect part of the pitch is that the “PhD level models” will accomplish 50x as much in a year as the human PhD, because they’re faster AND they work 24/7.

Whether they can deliver is another question, but I wouldn’t bet my career that they can’t.