Comment by usrnm
1 hour ago
> It's free
It isn't, the cost is included in your electricity bill, not even talking about the cost of your time to set it up. It's very possible that it costs you more than a cloud mode would, you just don't want to calculate it properly.
If you buy the computer specifically for inference it is more expensive than cloud, but if you had it anyway it's free.
True, but how many people (realistically) buy a computer with 48GB+ of RAM?
48gb of vram.
a machine like this is about a years rent for most people.
a small car for most others.
> It's very possible that it costs you more than a cloud mode would
...which is almost always true in a single request/reply mode and never true in batch mode. Single request usually 2x-3x more expensive than cloud and batch mode 2x-3x cheaper. Now, for narrow tasks, a finetuned tiny 8b model would dramatically outperform SOTA frontiers for a fraction of price, esp. on energy efficient hardware like Apple.
Local is never cheaper than cloud because they can do batch inference, and that means you load model weights once to produce 128 tokens on 128 sessions in parallel not 1 token on 1 session like local models. Local models rarely get to high utilization factor, they spend most of their time waiting.
If you had only batch inference and enough of it to fill the compute to 80% then you get cheaper local models.