And they won’t come cheap. According to reports, the costs for OpenAI agents could be as much as $20,000 – per month!

As discussed by Eric De Grasse in Project Counsel Media (Oh, come on! You just KNEW it was coming. OpenAI is exploring “salaries” for agents. available here), OpenAI is apparently considering tiered pricing for Deep Research style agents: $2,000/month for work equivalent to “high income knowledge workers”, $10,000/month for “software developer agents” and up to $20,000/month for “PhD-level research agents”.

As reported by TechCrunch, it’s unclear when these agentic tools might launch or which customers will be eligible to purchase them. But The Information notes that SoftBank, an OpenAI investor, has committed to spending $3 billion on OpenAI’s agent products this year alone.

You would think this is money grubbing on the part of OpenAI, but as the TechCrunch article notes: “OpenAI needs the money. The company lost roughly $5 billion last year after paying for costs related to running its services and other expenses.”

Of course, as Eric reminds us, Deep Research today consistently makes outrageous factual mistakes that would be unforgivable in a summer intern (he/she would be fired) and “hallucinations are embedded in LLMs, and not going away…And speaking of hallucinations, after, what, $1 trillion of investment in LLMs, we get…”

That was from Google AI, not OpenAI. And to be fair, Ariana Grande apparently did once jokingly say to Lady Gaga: “Oh my God, you’re two days older than me!” Nonetheless, this example shows that OpenAI agents may be just like actual employees (i.e., humans in general) in terms of believing everything it reads. 😉

So, what do you think? Would you consider paying up to $20,000 per month for an OpenAI agent? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot lawyer displaying an invoice to its client”.

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