The story is that these young engineers built a 500$ drone that consumes this kind of data to do mapping. In 24 hours for a hackathon no less.
If the US government didn't already have this kind of tech, they would spend millions just for the same prototype they built. And probably tens or hundreds of millions for a final product.
It's easy to shallowly dismiss work with a metaphor for how it works. LLM training is like a marble rolling down a valley. But hacking together a working proof of concept warms the heart.
