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- 💸 AI Earns $1M from Freelance Work?
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Read time: 5 minutes
Everybody always says that AI can now replace an intern. But what about a freelancer? Can AI take over this role too? There are about 3.7 million freelancers in the US. Are you worried about AI replacing freelance jobs?
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AI INSIGHTS
🤖 Can AI Earn $1M from Freelance Software Work?
This report introduces SWE-Lancer, a benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on 1,488 freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, collectively worth $1 million USD. The benchmark assesses both:
Independent Software Engineering (IC SWE) Tasks – where models generate real-world code fixes and features.
SWE Manager Tasks – where models evaluate and select the best engineering proposals.
The study aims to quantify AI’s real-world economic value in software engineering.
Key takeaways:
1. Current AI models still struggle with real-world software engineering
The best-performing model (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) only solved 26.2% of IC SWE tasks and 44.9% of SWE Manager tasks.
Claude 3.5 earned $208K out of $500K in the SWE-Lancer Diamond subset and $403K out of $1M in the full dataset.
2. Model Performance Analysis
Model | IC SWE Accuracy (Pass@1) | SWE Manager Accuracy (Pass@1) | Total Earnings (Diamond Set) |
|---|---|---|---|
Claude 3.5 Sonnet | 26.2% | 44.9% | $208K / $500K (41.5%) |
o1 (High Reasoning Effort) | 16.5% | 41.5% | $166K / $500K (33.1%) |
GPT-4o | 8.0% | 37.0% | $139K / $500K (27.7%) |
Claude 3.5 Sonnet performs the best, earning 40.3% of the total possible earnings in the full set.
More computational reasoning (test-time compute) improves performance but doesn’t fully close the gap.
3. Challenges AI Models Face
AI struggles with complex, full-stack engineering tasks.
→ Models locate bugs quickly but fail to fix root causes. They miss edge cases and lack deep contextual understanding.
AI models fail more often on implementation than evaluation.
→ Models are better at selecting solutions (SWE Manager tasks) than writing code.
AI-generated code lacks robustness.
→ Models often modify the wrong part of the code or apply partial fixes. Human engineers triple-verified the tests to ensure accurate evaluation.
Why it matters: SWE-Lancer provides a realistic, economically grounded benchmark for testing AI’s software engineering abilities. Current LLMs cannot yet replace freelance engineers but show potential in technical decision-making and partial automation.
The benchmark offers valuable insights for both AI research and the future of software engineering work in an AI-driven world.
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TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
🤖 China is making AI a national priority, pouring more capital into the race. DeepSeek’s low-cost models are now matching or even outperforming some Western rivals. With fresh funding and momentum, OpenAI has real competition.
⚙️ The world’s smartest AI (Grok 3) is now free to use - at least until the servers can’t handle it. If you’re on X Premium+ or SuperGrok, you get more access plus early features like Voice Mode. Enjoy it while it lasts.
💻 Microsoft has built the world’s first topological superconductor, making qubits more stable and scalable. Majorana 1 claimed that they can fit a million qubits on a single chip—a huge leap forward.
🚬 ChatGPT-powered conversational hypnosis is a low-cost alternative to therapy. One user and their friend quit nicotine and alcohol, with 120+ others reporting success—proving AI can drive real behavior change.
🧬 NVIDIA’s Evo 2 AI models DNA, RNA, and proteins across all life forms, scaling to 40B parameters and 1M token context. Trained on 9 trillion nucleotides, it’s reshaping genomics, drug discovery, and disease research.
💰 Daily AI Fundraising: Baseten Raises $75M, now valued at $825M. AI startup Baseten helps companies deploy AI models across multiple clouds, cutting inference costs by 40%
AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
🌐 Proxy 1.0 is the most powerful AI web browsing agent yet
💡 Fiverr Go unites human talent and AI to spark creativity
⚡ Apidog Fast Request develops APIs quickly and detects endpoints
🤖 Graphiti builds personalized AI agents that learn from data
📊 Yess AI is your research and sales cheat sheet for meetings
AI QUICK HITS
🤖 Clone Robotics reveals Protoclone a lifelike bipedal android with 500 sensors (Link)
🌐 Enroll Evaluating AI Agents course by DeepLearning AI for free (Link)
🧏♂️ Nvidia trains AI to understand and teach sign language (Link)
📱 Claude iOS app prepares for web search and smarter reasoning but beta toggle is hidden for now (Link)
🎥 Pikaswaps lets you replace anything in videos using AI descriptions (Link)
AI PROMPT
Greg Brockman shared the following prompt format for o1 (OpenAI’s reasoning models)
You can even upload a screenshot and say, “Help me write a prompt using this structure.”
AI CHEAT SHEET
AI JOBS
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The AI Fire Team
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