Stretching the analogy, something that gets you from point A to point B for a fraction of the price without the same level of comfort is totally fine for me. For some of my tasks, that means using local models. For others it might mean a frontier-last-year kind of model. That's totally acceptable most of the time. For anything else I guess it's like renting a truck to move; just get the right vehicle as needed and pay the premium.
A $50k car used 1,000 miles per month probably costs close to a thousand per month, assuming 200k miles of life. I imagine this is not unusual in the US.
Agreed. For personal use it's already easily worth $100 a month (to me personally). More probably. For work, it's entirely based on its financial impact for a given role, and for some people/companies it will be worth the cost even at $X thousand per month per seat.
I had codex write a CAN driver for a motor controller in Ardupilot in cpp. It took two fixes that it found and also helped me set the parameters once I had it compiled and installed in the board. I was considering getting an experienced Ardupilot dev to help me because I’m unfamiliar with CAN and cpp, which surely would have been $1000+ and lots of back and forth etc. . It’s such great technology.