[dgrabla]

Great breakdown!. The "own your own AI" at home is a terrific hobby if you like to tinker, but you are going to spend a ton of time and money on hardware that will be underutilized most of the time. If you want to go nuts check out Mitko Vasilev's dream machine. It makes no sense if you don't have a very clear use case that only requires small models or really slow token generation speeds.

If the goal however is not to tinker but to really build and learn AI, it is going to be financially better to rent those GPUs/TPUs as needs arise.

[theshrike79]

Any M-series Mac is "good enough" for home LLMs. Just grab LM studio and a model that fits in memory.

Yes, it will not rival OpenAI, but it's 100% local with no monthly fees and depending on the model no censoring or limits on what you can do with it.

[jrm4]

For what purpose? I'm asking this as someone who threw one of the cheap $500 Nvidia's with 16gb of VRAM and I'm already overwhelmed with what I can do already with Ollama, Krita+ComfyUI etc etc.

[lioeters]

> spend a ton of time and money

Not necessarily. For non-professional purposes, I've spent zero dollars (no additional memory or GPU) and I'm running a local language model that's good enough to help with many kinds of tasks including writing, coding, and translation.

It's a personal, private, budget AI that requires no network connection or third-party servers.

[ImPostingOnHN]

on what hardware (and how much did you spend on it)?

[memhole]

This is correct. The cost makes no sense outside of hobby and interest. You're far better off renting. I think there is some merit to having a local inference server if you're doing development. You can manage models and have a little more control over your infra as the main benefits.

[JKCalhoun]

Terrific hobby? Sign me up!