Haha, that's pretty clever. They get to sell $299 pedals, $20 plates, and upmarked "tokens" for their playground. Great example of selling shovels in a gold rush.
A cortex M7 developer board kit sells for about $40 on aliexpress. Throw in a few switches and a $10 case and you can have the same thing for ~$60 while doing almost no work yourself.
I don't know if they did anything fancy like increase the ram or storage or build a custom IC, so YMMV, of course.
Well, the raw price of parts to build a simple delay circuit might be ~$3, but the hardware to build it into an actual pedal is another ~$10--nobody sells one for less then ~$20.
The real question is: do they have a real-time DSP implementing the AI FX? If not, it's worthless: if you want lag, just use any of the ten million VSTs with your computer; if it is real time, then it's basically a natural language interface on top of an FPGA/DSP -- in which case it could be useful, if it's got reliable presets and pro-grade durability.
I still think most people would take an IR-2, though
I put my laptop in my pedalboard, but after i stomped on it a couple times it stopped working.
I jest, but there is a place in the world for pedals with a small amount of latency. As i pointed out in another comment, a codable dsp pedal isn’t a new idea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727231
I don't know if they did anything fancy like increase the ram or storage or build a custom IC, so YMMV, of course.