An aside: It was a very nice gesture and completely unexpected by me, so even if it doesn't work out, it made my day. I personally believe that kind gestures have a lot of power.
Back on topic: There is a real danger of the gap between rich and poor universities significantly widening in all fields if the rich can afford Pro level models, or even hardware that can run their own comparable models, and this being fiscally inaccessible to the rest.
One can sweep this under the rug by blaming the educational funding but this just shoots down all discussion. Even if GDP of a country goes up by a lot -- such as Poland -- it takes time before any budget benefit trickles to the education budget, and with some governments it might never do.
I believe Microsoft et al do have the most power here to boost affordable access to AI for researchers on a large scale; the fact that they cut some too expensive models (Opus, 5.5) from their academic benefits package is a grim omen. I do realize they would like universities to pay them also, and ultimately the universities should do that -- but then we are back at the institutional level of the problem.
You seem to have a good estimate in your head; I definitely do not.
From personal experience, ChatGPT 5.5 (the Plus tier) is excellent for programming tasks and also for various teaching related tasks but I have not observed the research benefits that Tim Gowers has when I asked it questions in my area of expertise. So the costs are definitely higher than a few dozen $ a month per PhD/professor.
You might be right that universities should immediately spring into action and demand funding for research level AI resources and hardware. One thing you might be mistaken in is that public universities are unfortunately very inflexible institutions; one reason for this is that they have a large internal leadership structure AND they are funded by the state, so even if the entire university agrees on something, the funding is at the whim of the ministry of education and thus the current political leadership.
I think the GP meant that *if the tools provide substantial benefit* to staff, their costs can be compared to salaries and other large expenses of the university. The $100/month subscription costs less than your office space.
At present, the tools are available for whomever wants to buy them. Not OpenAI's fault that parent comment's government and/or institutions policies haven't been updated to allow for their purchase and use.
I'd argue that the OpenAI dude/dudettes level of generosity is appropriate given the circumstances.
I probably will erase the contents in a few days.
Even if you just drop an email and it doesn't work out, I appreciate this gesture so much. Thank you.
Thank you.
There’s the example of a poor person and a rich person buying boots. The poor person’s boots wear out and have to be replaced while the rich persons boots last for many years due to higher quality craftsmanship. Over years, the poor person’s boots wear will pay may for boots.
Of course if you are really poor, then you have to take expensive shortcuts, but for most people that shouldn’t be the case. Learning to do more with less money isn’t as bad as many people think. It’s also good for the brain to be a bit more creative.
We are wading into philosophy here, but I believe this analogy doesn't track in this case -- my suspicion from this blog post and others is that already today, the Pro level thinking models are a positive multiplier to your research output similar to how the models one level lower are a multiplier to one's programming output.
Maybe one can someday use the cheaper models similar to how you can use cheaper models than Opus/5.5 and still be nearly as productive as a programmer -- but I am trying and failing doing exactly that for research questions.
But if you ask questions occasionally, (and don't resend, for example, your whole codebase with each request), then the API feels really cheap, even for the frontier models.
I'm not trying to shame here, just curious whether this is completely unattainable for most researchers in your area.
And the situation is better, ten years ago it would have been 80%.
I'll take a Euro salary and qualify life over a FIRE-typs salary and daily fear of falling into the abyss any day.
Your entire story only makes sense if you have many hundreds of dollars/euros of entirely disposable income every month left, after all unavoidable expenses have been paid for. I understand that this holds for you and everyone you know but I’d like you to appreciate that for very many people it doesn’t.
Are you honestly saying most families would be able to justify 200 usd a month for ChatGPT?
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
There are several other philosophical arguments against what you propose but I do not wish to go down that route.