[borisk]

How is it a waste of money if a lot of people, including the author of the article, already have an nVidia GPU in their PC?

Running locally has a lot of advantages - privacy, getting to learn how to run LLMs, not having to deal with quotas, logins, outages.

[hu3]

Home electricity bill of a decent GPU alone is usually more expensive than renting GPUs on demand.

[borisk]

Do you have any numbers to back that statement up?

E.g. I have solar panels and a home battery and pay less than a $100 a year for electricity.

[hu3]

Solar panels aren't free. And aren't hassle-free either.

I wouldn't even bring that into the equasion since a large part of the population can't use solar panels.

Not to mention GPU value depreciation.