Current prices are insane but at this point I'm starting to feel like it's an existential issue. I'm not a US citizen. At any point the USA could come up with some arbitrary export controls. Not having a computer capable of running at least Qwen is starting to actually seem risky to me.

At least it's going to be usable as a very high end gaming PC.

Why would you buy and build everything before the low probability catastrophe strikes, though? You don’t get any benefit from switching early and you pay a big opportunity cost.

because as soon as it strikes computer hardware will be completely unavailable to buy?

Also, there's a nontrivial learning curve involved in running your own inference server, once you move past the casual-goofing-around-with-llama-server stage. If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation, you should consider learning the ropes. Even if you don't put these skills to immediate use in your day job.

I didn't appreciate this until I started down that road myself.

> If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation

Couldn't have put it better myself. That's what all this comes down to. Owning the hardware, owning the inference. Not perpetually renting them out on a meter like in the dystopian future they're envisioning.

You also have the option to not use AI

Not in the future, not if you want to get paid.

Yeah but the truth is I don't want to go back to the pre-LLM world. I've been programming alone for over ten years. Having a coding buddy to talk to, collaborate with or just bounce ideas off of quite literally changed my life. I don't want to go back to solo programming, and my projects aren't exactly swimming in a sea of active contributors.

> low probability catastrophe

There is also a low probability that someone enters peace negotiations solely to threaten the negotiators with death, yet here we are. With these guys it is: Better safe than sorry.

Because you will not be the only one struggling to get the hardware in the "unlikely" case the POTUS blurts out another fart.

> At any point the USA could come up with some arbitrary export controls

lol his already happened with Fable!

At current "proprietary inference company behavior," investing in local inference sounds like the exceedingly far more rational option.

Long term predictability ought to far outweigh a few more cycles of performance.