[vessenes]

All this sounds right!

If money is no object, and you don't need a laptop, and you want a suggestion, then I'd say the M2 Ultra / Studio is the way to go. If money is still no object and you need a laptop, M3 with maxed RAM.

I have a 300GB/s M3 and a 400 GB/s M1 with more RAM, and generally the LLM difference is minimal; the extra RAM is helpful though.

If you want to try some stuff out, and don't anticipate running an LLM more than 10 hours a week, lambda labs or together.ai will save you a lot of money. :)

[cameroncairns]

The tech geek in me really wants to get a studio with an M2 ultra just for the cool factor, but yeah I think cost effectiveness wise it makes more sense to rent something in the cloud for now.

Things are moving so quickly with local llms too it's hard to say what the ideal hardware setup will be 6 months from now, so locking into a platform might not be the best idea.