For those talking about breakeven points and cheap cloud compute, you need to factor in the mental difference it makes running a test locally (which feels free) vs setting up a server and knowing you're paying per hour it's running. Even if the cost is low, I do different kinds of experiments knowing I'm not 'wasting money' every minute the GPU sits idle. Once something is working, then sure scaling up on cheap cloud compute makes sense. But it's really, really nice having local compute to get to that state.
For those talking about breakeven points and cheap cloud compute, you need to factor in the mental difference it makes running a test locally (which feels free) vs setting up a server and knowing you're paying per hour it's running. Even if the cost is low, I do different kinds of experiments knowing I'm not 'wasting money' every minute the GPU sits idle. Once something is working, then sure scaling up on cheap cloud compute makes sense. But it's really, really nice having local compute to get to that state.