>They had to burn millions of dollars to solve a single problem

I'd like to adjust that to "They had to burn a lot of energy (create a lot of entropy) to solve a single problem. As we go into the super-intelligence age the current paradigm of money as humans understand it may break at some point. For example to a paperclip-maximizer money at best is a short term instrumental goal, hard power of matter conversion machines is what it wants and once it has those money no longer has purpose.