OpenAI may launch a "doctoral-level" ChatGPT with a monthly salary of 14,000 yuan. Industry experts: Let AI be an intern first

Here is the English translation: Would you pay $2,000 per month for a "PhD-level" ChatGPT? Recently, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in an interview with Bloomberg that they will "open the door" to a $2,000 per month (equivalent to RMB 14,557) AI product subscription fee. According to her, this service is expected to provide "PhD-level" AI assistant functions. "If it can assist users globally and provide professional support at the doctoral level in various fields, this price is worth it for some users," she said. "For example, lawyers may not need to hire additional assistants, they just need this tool that is always available." As soon as the news came out, the public opinion immediately exploded. Former OpenAI luminary Andrej Karpathy said that the most valuable capability of AI is not to solve PhD-level problems, but whether it can handle the daily work of an intern, such as installing and setting up Slack, reading onboarding documents, and completing basic tasks. Well-known mathematician Terence Tao previously evaluated OpenAI's new model o1 as "a mediocre but not completely incompetent graduate student." He emphasized that AI should be seen as a research assistant, a supplement to human work rather than a replacement. "Although large models can assist research projects, the purpose of training graduate students is to cultivate the next generation of independent researchers." This pricing has also sparked widespread discussion among netizens. Netizen @Yuchenj_UW believes that instead of investing the same amount of money to subscribe to the AI service, it would be better to directly hire a human PhD. Netizen @EpistemiclyRich said that the price of the AI assistant should be affordable for more people, so as to promote the popularization of knowledge acquisition, just like the development of telephone and the Internet. Regarding the development prospects of AI services, Friar predicted that 2025 will be the year of the AI Agent. She said that OpenAI is evaluating the actual value of AI tasks to formulate a reasonable pricing strategy. "We need to consider the alternative cost, such as how much capital or how many employees the user needs to invest originally, in order to determine a fair price," she explained. Considering the high price, many industry insiders also speculate that this $2,000 ChatGPT product is likely to integrate functions such as AI Agents with autonomous planning capabilities. For ordinary users, whether it is worth paying for the "PhD-level" AI service may still need to wait for more details to be disclosed. Corresponding to the high subscription fee, OpenAI is currently facing huge financial pressure. Friar admitted that the development of OpenAI's next-generation GPT model will cost billions of dollars. "I think we have to continue in this direction of development," Friar said, "we need to develop larger and more expensive models." Previously, the media had analyzed OpenAI's revenue structure, and the membership subscription fee of ChatGPT accounted for nearly 80% of OpenAI's revenue. Therefore, adjusting the membership subscription fee may be the most effective way for OpenAI to increase its revenue. This article is from the WeChat public account "APPSO", author: APPSO, and is published with authorization from 36Kr.