H100s are almost-instantly available to anyone with a credit card and access to the internet. Without even having to lift their butt from the seat. And you get plenty more than five minutes of compute for the price of an M4.
Anyway, I was assuming personal use, like the messing-around experimenting that the article is about. (Or who knows, maybe it was part of the author’s job.)
"Pull out credit card, sign up for some thing and pay a bit of money" is a non-trivial bit of friction! Extremely non-trivial!
Especially in a corporate context - you have to get the expense approved. It's not clear if you can put company data onto the machine. Whereas generally running local things on corporate laptops is far less controversial.
"Download this tool and run it." is still an extremely powerful pitch. Pretty much the only thing that beats it is "go to this website which you can use without any signup or payment".
Cloud H100 don't count because you need lawyer to review ToS and other agreements.
Anyway, I thought the context was doing stuff for personal use/fun, not work.
In my personal life, when its time for fun, I close the laptop and go do some gardening.