I love my Spark-like, but even for training you're better off using Vast or Runpod or whatever to rent cloud compute. Much faster and cheap as hell, to be honest.

I do set up my initial runs and likes like quantisation-aware-distillation on my Spark-like to test it out and get it working, so it has value! But its not "worth" it other than its fun hardware to tinker with, IMO.

> You can't do that on larger models unless you have the hardware like this person does.

Or just rent something substantial for like $4/hr on runpod or w/e to do that.

My gripe is this persons compute is wasteful and makes it harder for me to buy something with like 64gb ram to do normal work and run containers while I keep using cloud models.

Someone else calculated the break even being 10 years, it’s just dumb. And I think it’s clear there won’t be a big rug pull anymore, there are too many open models and providers now.