AI Unplugged: How Much is a Digital Person Worth?

OpenAI's new price point for its agentic #AI is rumored to be as high as $24,000/year. Would people pay that much for a digital person?

Strawberry Fields Forever

Agentic AI has always been one of the end goals of AI development -- autonomous artificial intelligence that can do more than answer questions, it can perform tasks. You could for example train an AI to manage your social media, determine the best time to post, and then post on your behalf. You could even have meetings with your AI each day to see how things are going.

This has been the goal of OpenAI's Project Strawberry and Project Orion . Strawberry's training involves a technique called Self-Taught Reasoner (STAR). This is a synthetic self-development (the kind AI ethicists worry about ) that potentially can improve an AI exponentially without nearly as much human input. The end goal is Project Orion, which is an Artificial Generalized Intelligence that's both accurate and reliable .

The problem with agentic AI is, as OpenAI is discovering, it has enormous sunk costs to train it in this fashion. Which is why some eye-watering prices have been proposed for access to it.

How Much is That AI in the Window?

The implications of an AI that can just "do stuff" is tremendous for society. No longer is AI a magic chat box that sometimes answers things correctly. Now you can tell it to go do a thing on your behalf and, at least in the digital world, it can do it.

This will likely be the last gasp of social media, which will transition from dialogue between humans to AI representatives acting on behalf of humans (this is already happening , but the social media platforms don't want to admit it to the real humans who pay them).

Once agentic AI starts to become more common, we'll also likely start to see real job impacts as AI begins to take on tasks normally assigned to real people. We've already seen this in telemarketing, but any jobs that rely on words will be affected. By some estimates, we're just a few years out from this seriously impacting the workforce .

What Do We Need You For, Anyway?

For a sign of things to come, we can look to OpenAI's rumored costs for access to Project Orion on a monthly basis. The highest number touted so far was $2,000 per month, or $24,000 a year . (OpenAI has since released Strawberry as o1 ).

For comparison to human costs in the U.S., the lowest minimum wage is Georgia at $7.25/hour, or $15,000 a year. The highest minimum wage is Washington, D.C., at $17.50.hour or over $36,000 a year. $24,000 is right between those two. That's no accident.

Of course, agentic AI can't do everything a human can do, and so it's likely the tasks asked of Orion would command much higher salaries, and thus investment in an agentic AI would be easier to justify. Agentic AI has many applications too, in businesses as diverse as business operations, cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, human resources, scientific research, and software development. A simple example is the aforementioned social media manager, which averages $35,000/year at the entry level, making $24,000/year for an agentic AI a valuable investment.

But that price point moves agentic AI out of reach for most individual users. For AI agents to be competitively priced, developers will have to navigate the service model (no up front cost, but pay perpetually) vs. an ownership and maintenance model (like a car). The average cost of a new car is $40,000, with about $1,000 in expenses annually.

It seems likely Orion will likely not cost that much. OpenAI now has over 1 million paying users across its business properties (including ChatGPT Enterprise, Team, and Edu). When the time comes to sell agentic AI to businesses as a product or as a service, the price point OpenAI settles on will tell us volumes about what jobs they plan to replace.

Please Note: The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or any other organization.