I think Karpathys nn zero to hero is a good starting point. And you can experiment on small networks using pretty normal hardware.

I’m having a great time with an NVIDIA 3090. 24 GB RAM will run a lot of neat models. But at zero you can for sure just do CPU until you build a project ambitious enough.

> It seems pretty easy but the hardware is expensive.

Huh?

If your aim is to truly 'get started' with ML then hardware is absolutely not a bottleneck (either local or cloud).

Remember that ML is much more than LLMs. Even modern day LLMs can be quantized to a point where they can run on local hardware although their capabilities won't be as impressive.

I would recommend looking into some of Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want a grasp of the basics.

what is a linear algebra folk?