> I hope we find a path to at least fine-tuning medium sized models for prices that aren't outrageous
It's not that bad; there are lots of things you can do with a hobbyist budget. For example, a consumer GPU with 12 or 24 GB VRAM costs $1000-2000 and can let you run many models and do fine-tuning on them. The next step up, for fine-tuning larger models, is to rent an instance on vast.ai or something similar for a few hours with a 4-8 GPU instance, which will set you back maybe $200—still within the range of a hobbyist budget. Many academic fine-tuning efforts, like Stanford Alpaca, cost a few hundred dollars to fine-tune. It's only when you want to pretrain a large language model from scratch that you need thousands of GPUs and millions in funding.
It's not that bad; there are lots of things you can do with a hobbyist budget. For example, a consumer GPU with 12 or 24 GB VRAM costs $1000-2000 and can let you run many models and do fine-tuning on them. The next step up, for fine-tuning larger models, is to rent an instance on vast.ai or something similar for a few hours with a 4-8 GPU instance, which will set you back maybe $200—still within the range of a hobbyist budget. Many academic fine-tuning efforts, like Stanford Alpaca, cost a few hundred dollars to fine-tune. It's only when you want to pretrain a large language model from scratch that you need thousands of GPUs and millions in funding.