| Because I have a fixed expenditure on my local machine, and I can be absolutely sure of the costs over a long horizon (5+ years, for low end hardware life, 10+ years with moderate care). Not something that's true for cloud costs. Your argument is actually really similar to an argument around the time Uber started kicking into gear and expanding. It went: --- "Why should I own a car when it's actually cheaper to just Uber for all my rides, compared to the cost of buying, maintaining, and insuring a car?" --- And that wasn't an insane argument at that exact moment. Uber was pricing itself in the range of $5-$7 a ride, was novel and high quality. Except take a look around today... Uber in my area went from ~$5 a ride to ~$27 a ride for the same trip. Uber's quality has also degraded quite a bit. It went from primarily high end, new cars with immaculately clean interiors to "average". So want to make a wager on what's going to happen with cloud costs over the next decade for inference? Because my strong hunch is they're going to follow exactly the same trend. They will stop being subsidized, providers WILL downgrade model quality to improve operating costs (and you'll have no control over this outside of enterprise contracts), and companies will start exploring "additional revenue options"... which means they'll shove ads and sponsored content into your results. Is it worth being ~10-18 months behind the latest and greatest to avoid that entire set of shenanigans? I'd vote yes... I pay one time up front, and get usage limited by my hardware for the cost of electricity over a 10 year timeline. That's a decent deal with no surprises. You're welcome to rent, but renting makes you subject to the whims of the owners. They're being very nice right now to attract all the flies. That's not a mistake, and it's absolutely a trap. --- Side note - if you're only able to do labeling tasks with a local model... you're holding something very, very wrong. |