“a lot of people around him did the same.”
Your friend is in la la land.
I know a rich couple that would love to do this and 100% can’t because it’d be ludicrously expensive, even with no kids. And that’s in a place way cheaper than New York City.
…Maybe it was more practical when his parents were working, though?








AFAIK some outputs are made with a really tiny/quantized local LLM too.
And yeah, even that aside, GPT 3.5 is really bad these days. It’s obsolete.