[lelandbatey]

Only if you're trying to serve netflix-quality stuff to hundreds of thousands of people. If you're trying to replicate "Netflix the product" (live video streaming with a slick interface) to a small set of individuals, you can do that with a personal computer (see Jellyfin, Plex).

Comparing Netflix (and most highly profitable computer businesses) to the world of producing AI models by training is not going to be fruitful. Netflix takes a lot of effort to operate but you can do on the small scale what Netflix does, quite directly. You can't replicate an AI model like ChatGPT-4 very easily unless you have all the data and huge compute that OpenAI does. Now, once the model has been produced, you can operate that model on the small scale with maybe less amazing results (see llama.cpp, etc) but producing the model is a scale problem like producing high quality steel. You can't escape the need for scale (without some serious technological developments first).