Comment by user43928

Well, that's not how it works. You don't just put some old laptops into a rack.

Maybe with a decent consumer GPU like a 4090, you could do experiments like distilling and fine tuning a small image model for edge deployment for specific tasks.

Even there, many use cases might require renting compute for $10/hour and investing a few hundred.

A LLM from scratch? Forget it. You can do theoretical experiments, but not build anything remotely useful with that kind of budget.

If you're talented enough to come up with revolutionary methods, maybe an university or AI lab would be the place to be.