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A comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward. Parent comment

Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by gessha on Friday February 20, 2026 @01:37AM (#47084522)
Not to be cynical about it BUT a few safety papers a year with proper support is totally within the capabilities of a single PhD student and it costs about 100-150k to fund them through a university. Not saying that’s what Anthropocene does, I’m just saying chump change for those companies.
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Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by rrr_oh_man on Friday February 20, 2026 @02:27AM (#47084819)
You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid
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Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by pja on Friday February 20, 2026 @02:42AM (#47084922)
> You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid

All in costs for a PhD student include university overheads & tuition fees. The total probably doesn't hit $150k but is 2-3x the stipend that the student is receiving.

Someone currently working in academia might have current figures to hand.

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Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by latexr on Friday February 20, 2026 @05:38AM (#47086223)
Worth mentioning that numbers for the US are unlikely to be representative when discussing it as a whole, though might be relevant to this specific case.
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Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by pja on Saturday February 21, 2026 @04:08AM (#47098902)
In the UK the all in cost of a PhD student starts somewhere around £45k once you include overheads I believe. If you need expensive lab support then it probably goes up from there.

So about $75k for the bottom end? The quoted numbers sound about right in PPP terms in that case.

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Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by gessha on Saturday February 21, 2026 @04:59PM (#47105266)
Figure cited is what the company gets charged, not what the student gets. I’m fairly familiar with what gets thrown at students :(
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Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Ca... by pixl97 on Friday February 20, 2026 @08:30AM (#47087812)
Sometimes I think people misunderstand how hard of problem AI safety actually is. It's politics and mathematics wrapped up in a black box of interactions we barely understand.

More so we train them on human behavior and humans have a lot of rather unstable behaviors.

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