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.