the funny thing is, PhD stipends are so low that you could hire me for a year or this "PhD-level agent" for a month 
#academia
@lucianofloridi speaking of the eclipse of the analogue...
@emmiehine 20k per year is probably what they're paying the PhD locked inside the Turk.
@emmiehine Actualy, they're not paying the PhD anything, just shoving kibble and water thru the feeding slot.
@tinydoctor and the occasional pizza!
@emmiehine No. No pizza. They occasionally get the bottom of the empty used pizza box as a special treat.
@emmiehine @tinydoctor pizza crust
@emmiehine and there's zero chance that the AI could produce a PhD thesis, either, unless it's some Sokall-ed ersatz imitation.
The AIs could be used to review and accept such an AI PhD thesis. 
@emmiehine Grifters announce they're selling counterfeit $100 bills for the low low price of $200 each and investors are still buying it up. 
@jedbrown @emmiehine I see a market opening for PhDs to pretend to be bots pretending to be PhDs and make about ten times as much as they currently do
@ehproque @jedbrown @emmiehine
Not PhDs taking ai's jobs 
@emmiehine And as one place (possibly The Economist) joked recently, a real life PhD person can also make you coffee.
@emmiehine lmao indeed this is so stupid wtf
@emmiehine And ... "PhD-level agents" are just a chatbot which hallucinates falsehoods about science.
You can get that for free by visiting the aftermath of a student party.
@emmiehine @cstross The Analogue Revolution is here: “I dumped my OpenAI subscription and hired 12 PhD humans instead.”
@emmiehine The idea behind it: if you pay 20K$ per month, you spend the whole month looking for use cases for the AI and they don't have to.
@masek @emmiehine Oh that's clever. Read through supposedly high value interactions and start services or companies based on the information gained.
@drgroftehauge @emmiehine Exactly, analyze the usage of anyone not cancelling the subscription after 1-2 months. Takeover their business model. Easy peasy...
That is not new stuff.
@emmiehine That's both funny and terribly sad.
@emmiehine I mean, that's three times more expensive than me per month, and I'm nearish the top of the academic payscale. In fact, looking at my university's payscale, it's *still* more expensive than the entry-level pay for a full Professor [with a chair, highest pay step] per month! OpenAI might not know how little academia pays people in general.
Ah, but you wont work 24x7... they could hire 4 of you and still end up ahead ...
thinks, what could they need this for...
Oh yes, you might have qualms about building The Torment Nexus.
@patryk @emmiehine 8+ years in Ukraine 
Pretty sure you could get a real PhD for half the $20K/month OpenAI proposes to charge for one. And you could vet what they know and where they learned it, or even occasionally share a coffee instead of an electron with them.
@emmiehine Hmm. Professor level too…
Stellar 
(
era) @emmiehine@dair-community.social and i get a real phd agent not a LLM 
@emmiehine I'm pretty good at bullshitting, they might ask well skip the AI and have me reply to people's IMs directly 
@emmiehine Judging by the audio CEOs like Musk fetishize job cuts. I mean that literally.
@emmiehine Yeah but look you might ask for basic human rights, plus would count as HumEx and not OpEx ...
@emmiehine the thing about people is you can talk about your lives to each other. Cleverbot is just a tool.
@emmiehine That's more that I earned in a year during my own PhD. But "Capitalism is the most efficient economic system".
@emmiehine There was a summer teaching opportunity I was wanting to apply to. They were paying 20k for 6 weeks which is a CRAZY amount. Really tells you how little universities value you
@emmiehine even if you factored in additional PhD costs (office space, travel budget, IT, etc.) it would probably be cheaper than $20k a month.
@emmiehine
...and OpenAI will still lose money at this rate. Of course if your customer becomes dependent on such "agents, then your prices may rise.
@emmiehine And you would actually have human-level intelligence.
@emmiehine I was making ~$270 CAD a month before I left academia, and I doubt these agents can use lab equipment
@emmiehine case in point: the "utility" of the agent is not the goal, but cutting out the human is. Ceterum censeo: it will not work anyways.
@emmiehine yeah, but you aren’t “aligned”
@emmiehine Maybe someone should create a consulting agency hiring PhD students and selling their services at $20k/m with job titles "PhD-level agent"..?
@emmiehine also "PhD-level" is such a dead giveaway of someone who has no idea what research actually entails. It's like they heard "kindergarten level" and "high school level" and decided to extrapolate to the highest level of education they could find.
@baltakatei PhD students are not known for their immense amounts of agency either 
I hear it's being rebranded as the "School Is A Waste of Time and a Scam, I Learned from Life" agent for the US market.
@emmiehine @cainmark OpenAI will feature in business courses for ever. Raised billions without any idea of how to sell a product.
@emmiehine ...and unlike for the AI, I am willing to bet that Emmie Hine is not going to be hallucinating or misinterpreting stuff. I'm honestly not sure why anyone would use AI for anything beyond book recommendations or something like that
@vera well, don't give me too much credit xD
@emmiehine wow, is still 20k? It was that 20 years ago. And was barely above poverty line.
@gabriel TBF, my PhD is based in Europe, so it is lower than US stipends, but even the most generous US PhD stipends these days are like... 2.5 months of this agent
Can it design or conduct experiments. Can it direct humans to carry out other tasks? Or does it just reconstitute what it found on the internet?
@emmiehine To make a valid comparison, I'm afraid have to ask - how significant are your emissions, and do you use much water?
@sundew I do have my Nalgene with me at all times...
@emmiehine But you dont work 24/7.
And if this "agent" is learning, you are sure the agent aint leaving for another job.
And if its learning and working 24/7 it will learn much faster than you. Incremental.
@emmiehine or...how to spot bullshit from space
@emmiehine in Poland you could easilly get a years work of an undergrad for that money (source: my partner finally got her phd and a promotion, so she now makes about half of what I make... working for trade unions...).