What shovel skills are needed for running ChatGPT models?

Hi experts, so apparently I have zero knowledge about how ChatGPT (and similar models) work except that they need a lot of GPU. What kind of shovel skills I can learn at home at low cost? Let's say I'm not exactly interested in learning AI itself but just the supporting technologies.

I know vector database is one of them, what else? I think deploying models on top of GPU cluster is important, but from what I see on the market, an entry level GPU cluster machine costs in the north of 10K USD. Anything else?