The dev is highly intelligent / capable programmer but he was clearly hoping for way more initially. Hence the 1 Million coins for sale at 40K sats. Due to current market conditions he probably felt like he didn't have a choice to say that a much lower amount would be acceptable as he probably didn't want to let people down. Let's face it there was no promotion and not much investment. When you consider the work needed to build an artificial intelligence living on the blockchain... do you really think it can be done to the level of quality we all want for just 25 to 40 btc?
To be honest I think completing such an ambitious (and exiting) project will take more than 100 BTC or 200 BTC.
I think the dev. has given us a clue to this in the following comment:
There is indeed an opportunity cost for me, but I am making a big bet that towards 4th quarter of next year after we have the public open source XAI platform up, that I'll be able to put some pro-tools/SaaS in front of it and flip it to a VC/PE in the same way we've seen some other projects play out. But I think its important to put an open source decentralized platform like this out there first, it changes the dynamics + its disruptive.
I am not sure exactly what this first round of funds will be used for. But I think the important thing here is to get a team of interested parties together to get started on the project.
I think if a framework can be put in place by next year and it works a lot of interest from some heavyweight investors would not be hard to get.