The headline is dumb, but the research isn’t. According to the actual contents of the article, that $30 is still 27 times cheaper than what it costs OpenAI to make a similar sized model which also performs worse. That’s still a big deal even if the people reporting on it made a stupid title for their article about it.

I feel like the author here doesnt know what the definition of “breakthrough” is.

Yup and it’s not even testing general reasoning. They didn’t have money for that.