I am about to start working on a non-profit project -- not a startup, but similar in terms of resources dedicated to the project and how we hope it will scale.

One of our big questions is whether it makes sense to rent or to buy for training/finetuning/RLHF. The advantage of renting is obvious: I don't think that this phase of the project will last very long, and if it turns out that the idea is a success we'll have no problem securing funding for perma-improvement infra.

The possible advantage of buying is that we would then have the hardware available for inference hosting. We do expect some amount of demand in perpetuity. Having that ongoing cost as small as possible would allow us to continue serving the "clients" we KNOW would benefit a lot from our service with minimal recurring revenue.