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points by flakiness 3 days ago | 0 comments

What would be the computing cost to go through the book (or the course)? Do you need Cloud GPUs, or can this be run locally, if so how powerful your computer has to be?

I've been wondering about getting a PC to poke around LLM stuff (not a practical use, but more for learning purposes) but I don't have any intuition about how much is enough and whether it is worth it to me.

[–] libraryofbabel 3 days ago

You can go through it locally just fine; all you need to do is be able to run Qwen3 0.6B, which is a tiny LLM. A recent macbook (air or pro), or a PC with a good gaming GPU is perfect, but you can run the model and training examples on a PC CPU too; it will just be much slower. From his book (same examples as the video course):

> "the code examples have been carefully designed to run efficiently on a regular laptop, without the need for any special hardware. But if you do have access to a GPU, certain sections provide helpful tips on scaling up the datasets and models to take advantage of that extra power... The inference and evaluation chapters work well on CPUs and GPUs, while the training-oriented chapters benefit from access to a GPU if you want to reproduce the larger experiments."

So, consumer GPU helps but not essential. No need for expensive cloud GPU time.