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?
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.
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?
Do you think US$2,000 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.)
$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.
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.