I’m interested: how would you spend $20k to get close to performance parity (speed and ability) with a frontier model?

Not if there's competition.

Of course a company doesn’t want to pay for someone to delegate all their work for an additional fee.

This is why some companies stopped hiring juniors. They would rather pay a mid-level or higher with the expectations that the LLM use will be a productivity booster in a more direct sense. So the bar also rises.

Or just use AI mode on Google's homepage. I asked it to find an article that compares a certain thing to another, which doesn't exist. So Google automatically wrote a 5 page article comparing the two things and built a proper article with cited references. Most people don't need a subscription to anything.

In my observation employers are willing to throw practically unlimited cash, probably because it’s directly funding a future where they don’t have to pay pesky engineers with their holidays and their pensions.

Or just not hire the junior at all and spend that money on tokens.

> tgink

A token misfired

I understand your point; but I disagree - Unlimited is possible.

It gets into a "define unlimited" discussion. You could give "unlimited" usage, but still "limit" both concurrency and throttle speed. Even if you run 24/7, they still have knobs they can twist.

I'd be tired too if my industry was being destroyed and scavenged by millionaires