LLM Use/Research Hardware Tiers

Question

It seems there are tiers of hardware required for LLM use: both interacting/asking questions and also training, but I don't understand them. There's seemingly two ends: a )it runs on my Mac or b) it needs 8xH100 Nvidia cards at USD250k+.What are some other tiers? What could be done with 10k, 50k, 100k investments into compute?

user_7832 · Accepted Answer

At least for use you can get pretty far with 2k ish consumer hardware. Check out r/localllama if you want to learn more in general.

speedgoose · Answer

If you do research, you may have access to descent HPCs.