Comment by jwilliams
14 hours ago
> The mentality shift of renting vs. owning the gpus is huge. When renting, each experiment costs money and I had to ask myself is it worth it. When owning, it feels like not running experiments is costing me money.
I feel like there is some very deep generalizable wisdom buried here.
You should be able to achieve this mentality shift without owning a GPU. You just need to commit some money upfront to cloud GPU spend, in a way that is not feasible to go back on.
That way you get the experimentation-encouraging mentality shift to "If I don't use this, I'm wasting my money", without the cost inefficiencies associated with actually buying an accelerator, discussed by others in this thread -> you'll never be able to match the the utilisation and thus the cost amortisation of cloud GPUs.
Also something about subscriptions vs pay-for-usage. I feel the need to use all my weekly tokens or I'm wasting and I bet they would never get this kind of usage out of me if AI ended up being same price per token.
I always buy software/assets/dev tools for my hobbies (like CAD, music production, game dev) instead of paying subscriptions, even if that would very likely be way, way cheaper and would give me access to really cool tools. I don’t want to feel bad not using something and I know that’s the case with a subscription