I tried writing an AlphaZero clone to play Chess on my home PC (I only had an RTX 3070) and I failed for essentially the same reason as they mentioned: iteration time was too slow and you couldn’t tell if the model was getting any better at all after weeks of training.
I thought I’d work on it further and maybe write some blog or put some dev vlogs on YouTube but never got around to doing it. Might do it some day.
Till then I’ll just post some links to my Github if anyone wants to check out what I was doing:
He recommends trying NNUE on a CPU: https://www.chessprogramming.org/NNUE
Mostly because he hasn't seen anyone try it on the personal computer scale and would be interested to see how it pans out