Professor: Buy 4 Mac Studios and Run a 1T Model Instead of Burning Half Your Salary on Tokens
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-30
UW professor Dimitris Papailiopoulos pushes back on the idea that engineers happily pay half their salary for AI coding tools: paying that much in tokens makes little sense when you could buy four Mac Studios and run a 1-trillion-parameter model locally.
The original post he replied to argued that given how much work Codex and Claude get done for SWEs today, many would gladly trade half their salary for a two-day work week—and that everyone should thank competition from open-weight models, without which $200/month subscriptions wouldn't stay cheap for long.
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