Given that you're citing Wikipedia on this, the issue of detecting and fighting auto-generated slop in articles is actually quite fascinating.
There was a really interesting talk given by Mathias Shindler (long time editor of German Wikipedia) at the 39C3 conference about this topic a few months back that is worth a watch for anyone interested in the issue: https://youtu.be/fKU0V9hQMnY
Deepseek is a private corporation funded by a hedge fund (High-Flyer). I doubt much public money was spent by the Chinese state on this. Like with LLMs in the US, the people paying for it so far are mainly investors who are betting on a return in the long to medium term.
Sure, but the alternative is not really any better: if the choice is between being the guy who got it wrong vs. being the guy who got it wrong _and_ being the guy who persisted in throwing good money after bad, surely the former is prefereable. As far as I see, the fact that they keep going indicates that they genuinely still believe Copilot could pan out and become profittable in the long run.
Correcting for inflation (I used this tool by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), 30M USD in nov. 1995 would have a purchasing power equivalent to roughly 62M USD in feb. 2025. This is below half the budget of Moana 2 (150M USD, released in nov. 2024) for instance.
I suspect OP may have been going for a variation on the old "Programmer returns with zero eggs and 12 gallons of milk after having been asked to get one gallon of milk and if they have eggs to buy a dozen"-joke, but it falls flat in this instance since it relies on an interpretation bordering on deliberate misconstrual (i.e. applying the modifier "for each year of service" to the whole phrase "16 weeks plus two additional weeks" rather than just to the latter fragment "two additional weeks").
There was a really interesting talk given by Mathias Shindler (long time editor of German Wikipedia) at the 39C3 conference about this topic a few months back that is worth a watch for anyone interested in the issue: https://youtu.be/fKU0V9hQMnY