AI bills can be as big as a postdoc salary. Is the cost worth it?

Research laboratories are weighing up the costs and benefits of paying for artificial-intelligence tools. Credit: J Studios/Getty James Zou has spent “well over US$100,000” on artificial intelligence in the past year. “These models are very useful for researchers, for coding, for analysis, for literature summaries,” says Zou, a biomedical-data scientist who leads the AI for Science Laboratory at Stanford University in California. In his view, the fees, which are in the same ballpark as the cost of supporting a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, are worth it. He says “we’re entering into a new golden age of science with AI assistance” that enables fundamental scientific advances because of the “increasing capabilities of these AI scientist agents”. But AI assistance is starting to look more expensive for researchers. AI providers have struggled to make the economics work for them on subscription plans, so are hiking up prices and tightening usage limits. In January 2025, Sam Altman, chief executive of the California-based company OpenAI, posted on social-media site X that the firm was losing money on its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscriptions because people were using the chatbot more than the company expected, driving up OpenAI’s use of computing power and electricity. GitHub, a platform that allows developers to store and share their code, is the latest provider to change its pricing policy. …