> 1. I don't know what kind of world you live in to think that USD 3500 is "less than one week of a developer salary for most companies." I think you really just mean FAANG (or whatever the current acronym is) or potentially SV / offices in cities with very high COL.
I live in the real world, at a small company with <100 employees, a thousand miles away from SV.
$3200 * 52 == $180k a year, and gives $120k salary and $60k for taxes, social security, insurance, and other benefits, which isn't nearly FAANG level.
Even if you cut it in half and say it's 2 weeks of dev salary, or 3 weeks after taxes, it's not unreasonable as a business expense. It's less than a single license for some CAD software.
> 2. The problem is scaling. To support billions of search queries you would have to invest in a lot more than a single GPU. You also wouldn't only need a single van, but once you take scaling into account even at $3500 the GPUs will be much more expensive.
Sure, but you don't start out with a fleet of vans, and you wouldn't start out with a "fleet" of GPUs. A smart business would start small and use their income to grow.
I live in the real world, at a small company with <100 employees, a thousand miles away from SV.
$3200 * 52 == $180k a year, and gives $120k salary and $60k for taxes, social security, insurance, and other benefits, which isn't nearly FAANG level.
Even if you cut it in half and say it's 2 weeks of dev salary, or 3 weeks after taxes, it's not unreasonable as a business expense. It's less than a single license for some CAD software.
> 2. The problem is scaling. To support billions of search queries you would have to invest in a lot more than a single GPU. You also wouldn't only need a single van, but once you take scaling into account even at $3500 the GPUs will be much more expensive.
Sure, but you don't start out with a fleet of vans, and you wouldn't start out with a "fleet" of GPUs. A smart business would start small and use their income to grow.