Renting could be a good choice to get started. I used to rent a g4dn.xlarge instance from AWS (for Stable Diffusion, not LLMs). More affordable options are Runp

Renting could be a good choice to get started. I used to rent a g4dn.xlarge instance from AWS (for Stable Diffusion, not LLMs). More affordable options are Runpod and Vast.ai. I started with a local system using llama.cpp on CPU alone and for short questions and answers it was OK for me. Because (in 2023) I didn't know if LLMs would be any good, I chose cheap components https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267208. Since AWS was getting pretty expensive, I also bought an RTX 3060(16GB), an extra 16GB RAM (for a total of 32GB) and a superfast 1TB M.2 SSD. The total cost of the components was around €620. Here are some basic LLM performance numbers for my system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41845936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42843313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42843313