> $20,000 in API costs

I would interpret this as being at API pricing. At subscription pricing, it's probably at most 5 or 6 Max subscriptions worth.

> $20,000 set on fire

To be fair, that's two weeks of the employer cost of a FAANG engineer's labor. And no human hacks a working compiler in two weeks.

It's a lot of AI compute for a demo, sure. But $20k stunts are hardly unique. Clearly there's value being demonstrated here.