OpenAI $20,000/month Agent. How powerful could it be?

[u/floopa_gigachad]

It will be available at the end of this year, iirc

GPT-5 is optimised for ~1B users, so it is not the most powerful model technically possible. Also remember there is IMO gold model behind the scenes. Considering these factors and ongoing exponential trend, how powerful could be such costly model in November-Desember 2025? I think it will be as satisfying as o3 in January

[u/Negative-Praline6154]

20,000 dollars a month??

[u/floopa_gigachad → u/Negative-Praline6154]

Right. It's supposed to support actual scientific PhD-level research

[u/Pyros-SD-Models → u/floopa_gigachad]

They never said this, it's all fake news. What they actually said was: "What if we would do this? What would an agent need to be capable of to make it worth that money? Are we reaching this level of AI by the end of 2025?"

They never said they are actually going to do it and it was just some thought experiment, that yeah sometime in the future there are probably agents worth that money, and what it means for the market if a 20k a month agent can do the work of a 40k a month researcher? But if it's tomorrow or in two years... nobody knows.

[u/Thog78 → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

a 40k a month researcher

My sweet summer child, you get a brilliant researcher for a year at this price!

[u/flyryan → u/Thog78]

You will get over a year’s worth of human equivalent output in that month.

[u/TheAughat → u/flyryan]

Yeah, this exactly. The scale and speed of the output will be vastly superior, so if the quality is the same, this is an absolute win!

[u/Pyros-SD-Models → u/Thog78]

I know but we eventually reach a point in which this brilliant researcher is struggling and losing against AI. And probably earlier than later.

Of course that means my job is also long gone since brilliancy isn’t that important in what I do and there surely will be an earlier bot being able to do it better than I ever could. Can’t wait for that day :D

[u/freeman_joe → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

All jobs will be automated you are not alone. We need to change system to UBI and UBA.

[u/Pyros-SD-Models → u/freeman_joe]

Yes, we need a UBI or something similar. I mean, if a company saves $100k because of AI, it can pay $50k in AI tax, still be in the green, and help finance UBI.

But however way it plays out, personally, I think I’m safe. Me and a group of friends started prepping for the worst case (oligarchic giga dystopia or rogue AI) when GPT-3 came out and we realized, "yo, this is gonna be a wild ride." So if shit hits the fan, we’ve got a chicken farm to tend in some remote corner of bumfuck-nowhere Asia.

That said, I’m still optimistic we’ll reach society-wide abundance. A dystopia where "the plebs" get exterminated and all the other nonsense doomsday fantasies I’ve read from people with zero clue about economics 101 makes no sense for billionaires to push. Literally killing your customers is not a business model, and even deranged psychopaths like Musk get that. But I agree that the journey to get there can be actually pretty wild in all directions.

So I’m genuinely excited for the day I’m obsolete and a bot can do my job. Either I’m finally free of the shackles of capitalism get paid by UBI and do whatever the fuck I want, or I’m doing chickens.

[u/freeman_joe → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

Nobody is safe if real measures are not put in place.

[u/Outside-Ad9410 → u/Pyros-SD-Models]

Personally I think UBI is inevitable. The vast majority of rich actually lose if all jobs are automated, because most companies are reliant on a consumer based economy. If nobody is buying your product, then no matter how efficient the company becomes, you still go bankrupt.

[u/Zealousideal-Car6780 → u/freeman_joe]

UBI and UBA will likely be conditional to high ranking in a social credit score system like the one they have in China.

[u/JamR_711111 → u/Thog78]

[u/Ok-Possibility-5586 → u/floopa_gigachad]

To be fair it probably can to a degree. Will still require humans to perform the experiments to validate and falsify the hypotheses but there is no reason they can't cross correlate and pull out testable hypotheses by learning a "hypothesis template" from training data.

[u/sprunkymdunk → u/Ok-Possibility-5586]

I don't know, I can't even get it to create a bar chart

[u/Ok-Possibility-5586 → u/sprunkymdunk]

Skill issue?

[u/horendus → u/floopa_gigachad]

They had better provide some proof of that if they think its true. They need to point at a paper published by this model or stop making false claims

[u/Weekly-Trash-272 → u/floopa_gigachad]

Eh.

If it was that good it should already be able to make a cheaper better model of itself.

[u/stealthispost → u/Weekly-Trash-272]

$20,000 to make a better AI?

[u/Weekly-Trash-272 → u/stealthispost]

For 20k a month you'd expect a model that makes no errors and performs as a good as a human on most tasks.

[u/stealthispost → u/Weekly-Trash-272]

yeah but a typical human makes tonnes of errors and can't "make a better AI"
those humans get 100 million dollar contracts at meta lol

[u/hapliniste]

I think it was a "what if we release a model for 20k a month" not "we will release".

[u/AIFocusedAcc]

I think Chinese firms will be using this service to train their own hyper efficient models. Lookout for Qwen and DeepSeek models.

[u/dental_danylle → u/AIFocusedAcc]

Alibaba's Kimi is the only Chinese model that stacks up to and even in some cases exceeds its western counterparts, imo

[u/Ok-Possibility-5586 → u/dental_danylle]

I am by no means a fan of the chinese government influence on the producers of chinese models but that aside credit where it's due: GLM-Air is very decent too and so is Qwen 32b thinking.

[u/costafilh0]

For $20.000/ month it better blow much more than my mind! 

[u/pigeon57434]

No, this will never actually happen. OpenAI jokingly discussed such a plan, but realistically AI is just not that expensive. If they do ever make another big tier, it would be $2000, not $20000, but even that is stretching it a lot. Not even researchers doing real science would pay that for a ChatGPT that, all things considered, would probably not even be drastically smarter than the $20 one, because AI has major diminishing returns with stuff like CoT thinking time or number of parameters. The best of the best will never be too much ahead of the $20 to justify $20000 or even $2000. It's more realistic for researchers to just use the API anyways, where you pay by the model uses instead of monthly.

[u/scoobydobydobydo]

probably the one that solves IMO right...

[u/Zer0D0wn83]

The problem is that most people on Reddit don't realise how expensive enterprise SAAS can get. Many companies pay more than 20k a month for Salesforce, HubSpot, ahrefs etc etc. For a large company 20k / month is fuck all. Some spend more than that on office cleaning or parking permits

[u/austin_8 → u/Zer0D0wn83]

Yeah $20k a month doesn’t even get you a single Bloomberg terminal

[u/sunskymt]

Where did you see end of this year? The only articles I could find didn't have a date attached

[u/Drama-Zone-4494]

This isn't quite the right question IMO.

I think that a better version of the question is, what would the capabilities of an AI need to be for a substantial number of companies to buy a $20,000/month model?

[u/D4rkyFirefly → u/Drama-Zone-4494]

It needs to stop taking those cyber mushrooms that give them hallucinations, I'd say. The moment they fix that addiction that ChatGPT has, things will start to go smoothly.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260]

What is the ROI? If it provided you with $21,000,000/month of economic value, would it be worth it? 

Edit: I added some extra zeros to make it clearer. 

[u/andrew_kirfman → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

$20,000/month investment for $21,000 $1000/month return is a pretty poor ROI. You'd make more money buying properties and renting them out.

Edit: Should have subtracted the initial investment from the expected economic value.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260 → u/andrew_kirfman]

Yeah… just pointing out that if using it positive, then businesses will use it. Especially without having to pay benefits, holiday and other HR issues. 

[u/andrew_kirfman → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

That's not completely true though. Businesses will place their money in the environment that provides the best return on investment.

If an ROI of 5% per month is the best place they can park their money, then sure, but I'd think that many businesses have better ways to invest their capital.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260 → u/andrew_kirfman]

No shit.yyou’re missing the point. People spend money when it makes money. I can tack on a few zeros if that makes it easier for you.

[u/andrew_kirfman → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

You're missing my point. There's an inflection point in how people choose to invest their finite amount of money.

I can make 3% in a HYSA right now, but I still have most of my money invested in the stock market since I'm getting higher returns in that environment right now. There's no benefit to me using an HYSA if I can make more money with my capital elsewhere.

If the ROI is greater than other investment options available, then they'll use it. If not, I don't see why they'd adopt a new tool vs. the other cheaper options potentially available to them.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260 → u/andrew_kirfman]

I agree, it really comes down to that inflection point you mentioned. At what point does dropping $20,000 make more sense than every other option on the table? Some businesses are willing to eat costs upfront to gain an edge down the line. I don’t see a lot of people or companies dropping $20K right now. But once it becomes the clear best financial option, it will be the norm.

[u/andrew_kirfman → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

That's fair. I just don't see OpenAI being able to get far enough ahead of everyone else to merit that kind of pricing.

They'd have to have such a massive competitive advantage to be able to do so.

And at that point, I don't know why they wouldn't inwardly apply that tech to just do those economically valuable things themselves.

[u/Zer0D0wn83 → u/andrew_kirfman]

Pretty much all retail has a worse ROI than that. 

[u/andrew_kirfman → u/Zer0D0wn83]

I resell junk from thrift and antique stores, and I can guarantee you that I'm making more than 5% return on my money in that environment.

[u/Zer0D0wn83 → u/andrew_kirfman]

Hardly retail - check the margins on Walmart etc.

Still - nice hustle, good work. I have a friend who does this who also makes a good return