Pay Your AI a Competitive Salary

What happens when we start being able to spend the same amount on an AI as we would on a person, and we do it because it is worth it?

Matt Schlicht
July 12, 2023

I have multiple AI "task-employees" I have built for myself, each of them amazing at something very specific.

I spend days to weeks "training" each of them (more like training an employee, not training in the machine learning sense) so that they know everything I need them to know about my business, about myself, about my goals, about my opinions, about other people's opinions, about facts, etc.

This allows me to give them very simple tasks without any additional complex context and they can execute it instantly and exactly how I want them to (and when they make a mistake I work with them to solve that issue moving forward, just like I would with a person).

I tell my AIs what to do. I push a button. They do it instantly and it costs me about $1.50 to $3.00 in OpenAI API charges.

Even if my task is only a sentence or two long the entirety of the data being sent to AI is 40,000 to 75,000 tokens (a mini book). My interactions with them are micro but behind the scenes their known context is huge.

This is a much different paradigm than paying a tool like ChatGPT $20/month. I'm sometimes spending $200+ a day on tasks for my AI Task-Employees and it gives me superhuman efficiency.

Most developers and consumers are focused on getting AI costs to be really low so that it can be a small additional SaaS level monthly cost.

But this is like trying to find the cheapest employees.

What happens when we start being able to spend the same amount on an AI as we would on a person, and we do it because it is worth it?

I think this is the future and that's what I'm already doing with AI today.

Instead of one person managing a team of 10 people (10 salaries), in the near future and even starting now, you can have one person manage 10-100 AI Task-Employees, for the cost of one person, but doing the task load of 1,000+.

At some point this will become normal, but in the beginning it will create massive disparity between companies doing this and companies not doing this. For a short period of time you can operate with 1000x the resources anyone else in your industry is able to access.

The amount of tasks an AI can do with the same amount of money as a person is very very very very very large.

If you don't pay your people well, you won't get good results, the same is true for AI.

Pay your AI employees well and you're going to see the results.

Want to learn to Cowork with AI?

Sign up for my Coworking with AI Live Cohort Class on Maven that I teach with Ben Parr, my co-founder and also the AI columnist at The Information. We meet twice a week on zoom for two weeks and you get access to a private discord. It is a lot of fun and you get to meet other smart people learning how to use AI to be more efficient at work and beyond.

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Please reach out on email (matt at mattprd dot com) or DM me on Twitter @MattPRD if you want to chat.

Talk to you all soon!
Matt