[Scea91]

Its a problem of the individual institutions and countries. The budget required for AI tools currently is negligible compared to other university expenses. We don't need to call everything a systemic disadvantage when the disadvantaged (at the institution level) have agency here.

[NotOscarWilde]

Can you tell me what is the budget necessary to supply AI tools capable of substantial research assistance to all academic staff at a university?

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.

[krab]

> Can you tell me what is the budget necessary to supply AI tools capable of substantial research assistance to all academic staff at a university?

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.

[teiferer]

Which is good, since public money is tax money, so it better be spent wisely and not just thrown at the latest hype without thinking properly about it. It's a feature that public spending moves slowly, we should all be thankful for it.

[teiferer]

> The budget required for AI tools currently is negligible compared to other university expenses.

Is it? Do you have any idea what the salary of a mid-tier university researcher in an Eastern European country is? Or in Africa or south-east Asia? With sota LLM pricing you easily get into the same order of magnitude, so essentially labour cost would double for researchers at such universies. Not "negligible" at all.

[chis]

I feel like this is one of the most advantaged times in history in terms of regular citizens having access to cutting edge tools.

Looking online it seems like the low end estimate might be $30k a year for such math researchers? And ChatGPT pro or whatever you want will run $100 a month, and should be coverable by grants. I’m quite sure matlab alone cost more in the past