Yep. They got hacked in the past, 1k+ smartphones reported.

The cost is the attestation keys of a real phone. Once it gets burned, the phone is useless to them.

https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/inside-the-ai-phone-far...

Interesting article, thanks. I've done a bit of small scale phone farming (for my own cheap mobile proxies). In all reality the phones aren't that expensive, I went with Moto 5gs that cost $130 (retail), so in their case the phones pay for themselves in the first month.

Probably a decent amount of compute cost for video generation, but I'm sure they have access to free compute and inference for being in bed with a16z.