Yep. A communications professor where I did my MS says a 200usd/mo claude sub (which ant gives for free) does as much work as 5 grad students. It's mostly like you said, trying out new ideas rapidly.

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teamonkey 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.

	▲	porridgeraisin an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes. They have grad students too. This is just like having more grad students that don't need to be trained so the work you can get done is not bottlenecked by the number of people you can train.
	▲	pickleRick243 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's 90% to advance science via cheap labor and 10% to train a small group of future experts who will hire grad students to 90% advance science via cheap labor etc. ...