I wonder why they decided to call it 0.1M USD rather than 100k USD. For many of us, a million dollars is a large amount of money, even for a business.
Same reason things are x.99 - the 0.1 decimal "feels" smaller than seeing 100,000 - "holy fuck!" Etc
I’m sure they had their reasons, but all I can see is the Simpsons meme with Mr Burns at the ATM saying “What’s the smallest amount of money I can think of? A thousand dollars.” ;)
It's to imply that it costs other people in the millions, but they did it for only 0.1 million, which is a small number of millions. Just a rhetorical trick.
100k isn’t worth anywhere near what it used to due to inflation. It might get you a nice pickup truck or a kitchen remodel. If your business is doing research and can’t spend then it’s more of a hobby than a business.
Well, it's interesting to think about how much has been invested into BigModel companies (Anthropic, Perplexity, OpenAI) when it's very rapidly becoming commoditized.