When technology like tractors and computers replaced jobs of the past, we welcomed it because it made us more productive overall. This feels different because it's elite engineers who feel threatened. That high-status job doesn't make us any more important than other humans though.

I'm a developer, and if I'm lucky , if I get to spend half my time coding.

Github Copilot and Amazon Q have increased my productivity and my employer is happy to deploy that much more in features. Granted, many companies will see that as a reason to cut headcount, but they'll be left behind by the companies who use AI to add value rather than cut costs.

Stuff I put together circa 2010 on options for dealing with AI-drive unemployment: [1]https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]

"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic

[1] https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

When there are no PhDs left (because they took jobs in the trades), with what will OpenAI train its models?

The most likely outcome is that at time goes by, the information the model spits out becomes increasingly more dated, to the point where the companies which rely on these AI experts find themselves falling farther and farther behind in the sphere of global commerce. We will become like China - more efficient at doing *something* than everyone else in the world, but without the ability to innovate o

Don't be fooled it's not about conning rich companies.

It's about conning journalists and you. Yet again Altman has got open AI in the news next to the claim about phd leavel intelligence, by quoting an exorbitant price. But because it's about the price and implications, the claim of phd level intelligence is unchallenged.

It's marketing.

What's not sustainable isn't the pricing. It's the entire model of how LLMs work. They have been trained on input generated by intelligent human beings. If human contributions to the data pool become diluted, the models will be left to gobbling up and regurgitating their own output.

Funny how we still don't see any stories of replacing managers with AI. Sure does seem like obvious low-hanging fruit.

You missed the forest for the trees. The current cost is there to artificially limit the load. Only the places that have [near] unlimited money to throw at problems will use it.

Once the P[seudo]hD is shown to be capable and sustainable...it will be a-PhD-ocalypse.

Maybe not, but the endgame is in sight.

> By contrast, a postdoc salary runs on the order of $60k-$120k annually, depending upon the field and experience. Can get 2-4 human PhD researchers for the price of a fake hallucinating one.

Remember that the fully encumbered cost to support staff (pretty much any staff, including postdocs) is substantially higher than the salary alone. Benefits, office space, etc. can easily be more than double the salary. There are things a postdoc can do that an AI will never do (such as supporting the local eatery for lunch), but those additional overheads for a real human can be an attractive target for some managers, at least in the short term (and many managers only look at the short term).

Why do people assume you'd keep it for a whole year like a person? It's a tool. You just have to learn how to plan the workload. Get everything together and let it chew through your workload for a month or so and be done with it. A person cannot compete with how long and continuously these models can run.

> By contrast, a postdoc salary runs on the order of $60k-$120k annually, depending upon the field and experience. Can get 2-4 human PhD researchers for the price of a fake hallucinating one.

Taking for granted it can actually perform research at the level of a postdoc, I find it easy to believe that the OpenAI agent is more than 2-4x faster. How long does it take the AI to respond to "give me a report summarizing the relationship between X and Y based on the latest research in $field"? I'd assume minutes to hours, compared to days to weeks for a human.

And, again taking for granted it can actually perform at a postdoc level, I assume it can bring that level of performance to a far wider range

I am worth more. I got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Before agriculture, we spent most of our time getting food. Now, a small fraction of us. Before the industrial revolution, we spent most of our time on physical labor. I think replacing knowledge work is a similar scale.

As a programmer, I see a career path in writing software with AI. I'm doing more fun stuff like design and less grunt work. I think we will just reconsider what we consider 'moving up'. Maybe comedians gets more prestige because AIs are bad at comedy. Maybe we value nurses over doctors for t

Simple the don't intend to distribute royalties. Just like normal PhDs don't distribute royalties to the generations of people that they learned from.

The same way professors claim a royalty on the works that their students eventually put out.

The same way authors claim a royalty on anything inspired by their works when readers find their books in a library.

I think your time-scale is off. Not this year. Almost certainly not next year. At 5 years it starts to get fuzzy.

What price a loan to get through college?

Should add 'Internet Expert Level'

With their 20k AI you can replace your paper-mill and have consistent flow of publications for $20K.

They can write papers about AI, then you create company with them - go IPO and profit!

The answer is yes you can. Ph'D-Level means nothing like most advertising hype. It is akin to up to 90% off, which actually means that nothing is more than 90% off. It would be true, if they had actually doubled the price of everything.

Indeed. They should try to consistently beat some kindergardeners first with regards to insight before they claim "PhD-level". The whole thing is just yet another instance of the overall scam.