Interesting article, thanks. I've done a bit of small scale phone farming (for my own cheap mobile proxies). In all reality the phones aren't that expensive, I went with Moto 5gs that cost $130 (retail), so in their case the phones pay for themselves in the first month.

Probably a decent amount of compute cost for video generation, but I'm sure they have access to free compute and inference for being in bed with a16z.