> if he needs enormous compute resources, he can get it at any of several cloud providers
This is exactly the experience of most teams I've spoken with, be they students or businesses, for all the pre-production phase. You simply can't and shouldn't spend on costly AI infrastructure before you've nailed your solution; in fact any kind of infra not just AI.
What you do is rent some cloud to power quickly through your tests — better have 10x worth of big Nvidia GPUs over 2 weeks than buy 1 or 2 max yourself and wait 5-10x more time — not even factoring that setting up clusters of GPU and running such workflows consistently over days, weeks requires pretty deep sysadmin/hardware knowledge and experience; it took me two years to really master that non-problem part on my home server (but now it's a skill I have so that was worth it, but certainly set my research and learning back by as much time).
Besides, there's a time when the familiarity, safety and general comfort of home simply can't be beat. Notwithstanding pool tables and free soda, lol.
This is exactly the experience of most teams I've spoken with, be they students or businesses, for all the pre-production phase. You simply can't and shouldn't spend on costly AI infrastructure before you've nailed your solution; in fact any kind of infra not just AI.
What you do is rent some cloud to power quickly through your tests — better have 10x worth of big Nvidia GPUs over 2 weeks than buy 1 or 2 max yourself and wait 5-10x more time — not even factoring that setting up clusters of GPU and running such workflows consistently over days, weeks requires pretty deep sysadmin/hardware knowledge and experience; it took me two years to really master that non-problem part on my home server (but now it's a skill I have so that was worth it, but certainly set my research and learning back by as much time).
Besides, there's a time when the familiarity, safety and general comfort of home simply can't be beat. Notwithstanding pool tables and free soda, lol.