Thread

1. WarmWash · 1790002114 · focus · HN ↗

   >Let’s address the elephant in the room first: why bother with local AI at all when cloud frontier models are better and often faster?

   Ehh, the actual elephant in the room is:

   "why bother with local AI at all when you can lease a GPU for $5/hr?"

   To which the answer is you shouldn't bother, unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

   1. chasd00 · 1790007491 · focus · HN ↗

      > unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

      there are lots of people with very expensive hobbies, see sailboat racing for example.

      1. [deleted] · 1790010195 · focus · HN ↗

         [deleted]

   2. Youden · 1790013291 · focus · HN ↗

      $5/hr = $3600/mo.

      Unless you only need the AI available some of the time, $5/hr is pretty expensive. That's an RTX Pro twice a year.

      If you're using it for discrete sessions of coding or something, that might make sense for you but if you're using it for an always-on assistant, that pricing kinda sucks.

      1. WarmWash · 1790016083 · focus · HN ↗

         I would imagine extremely few people are utilizing an H200 for every hour of a month. Especially for something like an assistant

         5090's are like $0.20/hr

         1. brandon272 · 1790046508 · focus · HN ↗

            For a lot of people involved in local LLM, ownership and control of their data matters to them a lot. It's what pulls a lot of people toward local models. Renting a 5090 off of some random infrastructure provider that is reselling some random dude's 5090 does not fit the bill.

            1. directdev · 1790974179 · focus · HN ↗

               [dead]

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