> Burned $2K to see how it will perform on frontend tasks and backend tasks.
When I read such statements on HN, I nearly always ask myself: if the person has such an amount of money to burn, don't there exist much more fun opportunities to burn buckets of money than doing such experiments on LLMs?
My company gives me 1k a month to burn on Claude. Any experiments have to be relevant to my work. I'm guessing it’s similar.
Yeah, seriously. I've decided not to try Fable at all, because if it is good, I don't want to get hooked, and then feel tempted to spend extra money for it when Anthropic pulls it from subscription plan access.
I'm lucky that $2k isn't a lot of money for me, though I'd much rather spend it on basically anything other than LLM credits.
As another poster noted, imagine if that money went to open source, on the regular... As an open source maintainer myself, that line of thought makes me sad.
But hey, I know I probably spend money on stuff other people would think is stupid, so I shouldn't criticize.
Imagine if all that money was donated to open source instead.
Yeah, LLMs would have more stuff to steal. A win-win situation.
The other side of this is... the thing that made the web is anyone, even a 12-year-old who just downloaded Notepad++, could spend a few hours and build a website.
VSCode is free. Stackoverflow is free. MDN is free. There are examples out there of every trick in the book, you can even use free AI to find them. You can even hose your website on Github pages for free.
But nevermind that, what's exciting is paying a robot a month's rent to do the thing that you could just go learn how to do in an afternoon?
> if the person has such an amount of money to burn, don't there exist much more fun opportunities to burn buckets of money than doing such experiments on LLMs?
Do you think US$2,000 is a lot of money?
Yes, that is objectively a lot of money. The only people who wouldn't consider that a lot of money are the small percentage of people with incomes high enough to recover that very quickly -- the top roughly 10% or 20% of income earners in the US. For more or less everyone else, that is a lot of money.
And by a lot of money, I mean that being forced to unexpectedly spend that would be anywhere from stressful to very stressful to blowing away savings and impacting health, housing, and safety. (Remember, half the US has no savings and/or no ability to absorb an unexpected expense greater than $500.)
I live in the United States. I write software for a living. My wife is a physician.
If I had a need to spend $2k, I could do so easily, but I still think it’s a lot of money to burn. I wouldn’t spend it on a whim; I would not spend it without carefully, considering the value of what I get.
I would not even spend that much money in the businesses that I own, or recommended that my well capitalized employer spend that much money without being reasonably confident that the business would get good value for its money.
I'll bite. Yes, it's a lot of money. It's several months worth of nice healthy groceries for a family of 4. It's my annual deductible on my health insurance. It's slightly lower than my annual property taxes.
Perhaps not for you and me (though I'm certainly not going to light $2k on fire in an LLM for shits and giggles; I have plenty of significantly better uses for that), but $2k for the vast majority of people in the US is a super big deal amount of money. Many people in the US don't even have that much to spare for an emergency, let alone for something fun.
$2000 is a lot of money, but so are the tech budgets of most places I've worked. Money can be a funny thing in corporate environments. They'll spend freely on some things, and be stingy on others.
$2000 as a test case that you can present to the rest of the company as a "this is what I learned and how best to use it" can be "cheap" in the sense that it produced real results that allow others to take advantage of the gained knowledge, thereby allowing the company to be more productive. If the $2000 produced an ROI that pays for itself within a reasonable time frame, then it's "cheap".
$2000 can be expensive if it's a college kid trying to complete an assignment.
Now that we have trillionaires running around, it may not seem like it, but it is a considerable amount of money in most of the USA. In many parts of the world it would be considered an unfathomable amount.
If I pay for it, yes. If my employer pays for it, no.
that is much better spent money by employer than to give you extra compensation. but as you said, not a lot, who needs $2k after all
That's a monthly mortgage payment for anyone who bought a starter house in a tier2/3 city prior to ~2024
I mean what is that, three bananas?
"It's inference, Michael. What could it cost, $1000?"
It is lot of money to burn.