I think both of y’all glossed over the $25k of it all pretty quickly. This isn’t remotely an option for anyone.
You see it as money spent, others might see it as an investment. OP doesn't necessarily say exactly what they use it for, but if education is the goal, $25k and spending your evenings learning about AI theory and tooling is way cheaper than a university degree and can easily result in millions more dollars in lifetime earnings given the current early state of the technology.
Besides, I regularly see people here in HN spend a LOT more than that on hobbies and depreciating assets. A few years back, people with coastal salaries and tech jobs were tripping over themselves to spend $100k on a certain brand of trendy electric car.
AnyONE. But if you got some friends, and they got friends, then that $25k becomes smaller and stomachable. My favorite rumor out of LA is groups of friends with a Lamborghini Urus that they timeshare. No idea if it's true, but if car people can get together to buy/lease a car that's MSRP is $345k, I think $25k should be an option for anyone with friends. (Hypothetically. I've read a lot about this friend thing on the Internet!)
If 10 people are sharing it the speed advantages suddenly drop drastically. That’s $2500 a head. 5 would be $5k. Then all the rules and such you need in place
This is all this stuff that dries people to pay for frontier models. Even running modest models requires a few thousand, unless you just want really lean ones. People don’t need frontier but it’s not cheap to effectively run, say, a 16gb Qwen 3.6 or 3.8 in the 30b range. Ram is like $15/gb and GPU’s with 16gb vram are hardly cheap.
In the 90s we'd pay $5k a head (inflation adjusted - about $2k then) for a 486 with 80MB of disk space
Its a drop in the bucket for many businesses though.
{"deleted":true,"id":50241238,"parent":50241186,"time":1793007051,"type":"comment"}