alt Hacker NewsLocal machines are a sunk cost, so using them is effectively free. Why would you pay a cloud host to run a model that can happily work on your MacBook?
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layer8 • today at 2:10 PM
Most people don’t have local machines with sufficient computational power and RAM.
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If you have a machine and suddenly realize you can run LLMs on it, yes.
If you're buying a machine specifically so it's capable of running LLMs for you, then the purchase cost is your up-front payment for the inference you'll run.
And between that and electricity costs, cloud has you beat.