Yeah there's circumstances where a really expensive service is worth the small advantage, but for an upcoming college graduate there's no way this is the case. If you want to try out an LLM, spend $200 once for a used 16GB A770, and put that CS degree to some use learning to locally run an LLM that's 90% as useful, for as long as you want.
lol at this howler of a paragraph:
> "I want to leave that on the table for a moment, because the absurdity of it is easy to miss on the first reading. A young man about to commit a hundred thousand dollars and two years of his short life to a credentialed path that AI is currently dismantling, and the reason he has not yet picked up the instrument that is dismantling it is that he cannot find two hundred dollars a month. Not for a year — for a month. The credential he is about to buy could fund the subscription for forty years."
"Not for a year, for a month" of course makes zero sense -- but the intro sentence is also so characteristic; a variant of "let that sink in."
In truth, the whole thing makes zero sense:
(1) Because LLM access costs $0, and you can learn almost everything you need to know on the free tiers. You won't be able to work on serious projects, but that's not what noobs need, anyway.
(2) Because "Comp Sci" isn't coding. The friend's nephew could be doing more theoretical (and more prestigious) stuff in computer-adjacent mathematics or physics. Here LLMs might be an interesting tool, but they're strictly non-essential.
> "Not for a year, for a month" of course makes zero sense
It made good sense to me - I read it as understanding that the claim is that one month of a subscription would be enough for them to understand what this technology is offering, and to make a more informed decision. It's a "try before you buy" argument - why would you put down the equivalent of 40 years of something, before giving a version of it a quick try for a 1 month's price?
But that's the whole issue, really. There are $10/month and $20/month tiers that are amazingly functional, even if you can't afford or don't want to pay $200/month. So $200/year is already a reality. As is $0/year, especially (but not solely) if you're on the kimi/deepseek/huggingface/OS path.