alt Hacker News> ...making the perfect hardware for home inference machines.
I really don't get why anybody would want that. What's the use case there?
If someone doesn't care about privacy, they can use for-profit services because they are basically losing money, trying to corner the market.
If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster (if they can afford it) but also with no upfront cost per project. This can be done with a lot of scaffolding, e.g. Mistral, HuggingFace, or not, e.g. AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud, etc. The point being that you do NOT purchase the GPU or even dedicated hardware, e.g. Google TPU, but rather rent for what you actually need and when the next gen is up, you're not stuck with "old" gen.
So... what use case if left, somebody who is both technical, very privacy conscious AND want to do so offline despite have 5G or satellite connectivity pretty much anywhere?
I honestly don't get who that's for (and I did try a dozens of local models, so I'm actually curious).
PS: FWIW https://pricepertoken.com might help but not sure it shows the infrastructure each rely on to compare. If you have a better link please share back.
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I think the main use case is home automation. You don't want details of your home setup leaking out.
Genuine question: If I were to fine-tune a model with 10 years of business data in a competitive space, would you feel safe with cloud training?
> If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster (if they can afford it) but also with no upfront cost per project. This can be done with a lot of scaffolding, e.g. Mistral, HuggingFace, or not, e.g. AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud, etc.
I'm a somewhat tech heavy guy (compiles my own kernel, uses online hosting, etc).
Reading your comment doesn't sound appealing at all. I do almost no cloud stuff. I don't know which provider to choose. I have to compare costs. How can I trust they won't peek at my data (no, a Privacy Policy is not enough - I'd need encryption with only me having the key). What do I do if they suddenly jack up the rates or go out of business? I suddenly need a backup strategy as well. And repeat the whole painful loop.
I'll lose a lot more time figuring this out than with a Mac Studio. I'll probably lose money too. I'll rent from one provider, get stuck, and having a busy life, sit on it a month or two before I find a fix (paying money for nothing). At least if I use the Mac Studio as my primary machine, I don't have to worry about money going to waste because I'm actually utilizing it.
And chances are, a lot of the data I'll use it with (e.g. mail) is sitting on the same machine anyway. Getting something on the cloud to work with it is yet-another-pain.