All of your objections have already been addressed by the previous comments.

The original comment states that the person in question already had a suitable graphics card to hand, so it did not require a monetary investment.

GP clearly states that "someone who is into that that stuff" was guiding the process, so it did not require a significant time investment.

> I'm particularly calling out the hypocrisy of the original comment. Being Anti-AI, and then spending hours on setting up a less than frontier AI model.

I see no hypocrisy in the original comment.

You've also assumed the skeptic in question doubts the capabilities of AI. That may be the case (like you, I have no idea), but they may also have privacy concerns, in which case a local model is the appropriate choice.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of AI.