this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Yeah, I'm surprised at how low that is, a software engineer in a developed country is about 100k USD per year.
So 40M USD for training ChatGPT 4 is the cost of 400 engineers for one year.
They say cost of salaries could make up to 50% of the total, so the total cost is 800 engineers for one year.
That doesn't seem extreme.
100k USD per engineer assumes they're exclusively hiring from US and Switzerland, that's not a general "developed country" thing. US is an outlier.
US and Switzerland are way over 100k. For Netherlands and Germany 100k is a good approximation for the company costs for a senior SWE.
I did already back up the claim with a source, but okay:
US: Senior 128k USD, mid-level 94k USD
CH: Senior 118k CHF (~139k USD), mid-level 95k CHF (~112k USD)
DE: Senior 72k EUR (~80k USD), mid-level 58k EUR (~65k USD)
NL: Senior 69k EUR (~77k USD), mid-level 52k EUR (~58k USD)
Yes, US and Switzerland are outliers.
Yeah, 80k gross for the worker creates close to 100k costs for the employer.
I'm talking about the cost of the engineer for the company, not the salary, which is less relevant here. In some EU countries, the salaries may be lower, but the taxes are higher to pay for the social system, so the cost for the company is similar.
Yes. Also, Europeans work fewer hours per year. There are big differences between EU countries, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours
This is just the estimates to train the model, so it's not accounting for the cost to develop the system for training, collecting the data, etc. This is just pure processing cost, which is staggeringly large numbers.