Nvidia's DG-Net: Dress up people with different clothes/use as training data
github.com
github.com
Not a sarcastic question
I own a 1080ti (12GB RAM) - and I consider this "high-end" for many people who aren't actively employed for machine learning (College kids and younger especially). I know you can "use the cloud" but I would really prefer not to...
You can always just use smaller models and/or lower resolutions though; of course the results won't be on par but it may reach a qualitative result (for research and experimentation purposes) or good enough result (for personal application purposes). E.g. hobbyists don't need AlphaGo-level go playing AI (which I'm sure had aggregate costs in 5 figures or more to train), reduced versions play all far above our levels -- although in this case there's the interesting effort of pooling hobbyist resources to indeed reach SOTA, see LeelaZero[1] and LCZero.
Some kinds of research will be effective only at large orgs, that's always been true. There was indeed a brief period when people realized GPUs could unleash deep learning/CNNs that you could do anything with a good GPU, but that was very much an exception. To borrow from another field, you cannot do a level of car engine research without all infrastructure to fabricate and test engine prototypes (though you can do some/other kinds of theoretical analysis).
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/video/gputechconf/gtc/...
Alas, not even AMD allows access to their GPUDirect equivalent, and I can't imagine anyone being able to drum up enough pressure for those vendors to flip the toggle to make them available on their consumer lines.
Clever market segmentation.
You are giving too much credit to their competence to release any smaller sized model.
Edit: > GPU Memory >= 10G (for fp16)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-vii-end-of-life...