What does “PhD-level” AI mean? OpenAI’s rumored $20,000 agent plan explained.

The AI industry has a new buzzword: "PhD-level AI." According to a report from The Information, OpenAI may be planning to launch several specialized AI "agent" products including a $20,000 monthly tier focused on supporting "PhD-level research." Other reportedly planned agents include a "high-income knowledge worker" assistant at $2,000 monthly and a software developer agent at $10,000 monthly.

OpenAI has not yet confirmed these prices, but they have mentioned PhD-level AI capabilities before. So what exactly constitutes "PhD-level AI"? The term refers to models that supposedly perform tasks requiring doctoral-level expertise. These include agents conducting advanced research, writing and debugging complex code without human intervention, and analyzing large datasets to generate comprehensive reports. The key claim is that these models can tackle problems that typically require years of specialized academic training.

Companies like OpenAI base their "PhD-level" claims on performance in specific benchmark tests. For example, OpenAI's o1 series models reportedly performed well in science, coding, and math tests, with results similar to human PhD students on challenging tasks. The company's Deep Research tool, which can generate research papers with citations, scored 26.6 percent on "Humanity's Last Exam," a comprehensive evaluation covering over 3,000 questions across more than 100 subjects.

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