Dumping $100,000 into it, and trying to save a few bucks on the model. Penny wise, pound foolish.

It's a $100,000 PR stunt, I'm sure they're looking at the press/media coverage and consider it worth it. Any actual institutional knowledge gained of how to make an LLM run a retail store is incidental.

Compared to the money at AI companies spend on billboards in SF the 100k is probably a drop in the bucket.