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Comment by graphime | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

$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.

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.

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

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.

I mean what is that, three bananas?

"It's inference, Michael. What could it cost, $1000?"

Do you think $10 is a lot of money for a carton of milk? I think it is.

It is lot of money to burn.

That's a monthly mortgage payment for anyone who bought a starter house in a tier2/3 city prior to ~2024

yes.

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