An on-demand v5e-1 is $1.2/h, it's pretty accessible.

The challenge is getting them to run efficiently, which typically involves learning JAX.

People with $3 are whales now? TPU prices are similar to other cloud resources.

Does anyone do anything useful with a $3 spend, or is it $3 X $manyManyHours?

No one does anything useful with a $3 spend. That's not anything particular to TPUs, though.

That's my point. The touting of $3 is beyond misleading.

You can do real work for a few hundred dollars which is hardly the exclusive domain of "whales"?

The programmer who writes code to run on these likely costs at least 15x this amount an hour.