They cost more to run than hosted anyway. But that isn't the point of having them. They are a playground, a backup when the internet is down, or claude is down. They can render Blender scenes pretty well. They play any game I want.

You can do each of those at various hosts and own nothing. Or own a couple "over priced" cards and do it all at home on battery power for a few hours while the power is out.

> You could sell those and have enough money to pay for hosted inference for years.

From a quick search a 3090 looks to go for about 1500-2000 USD. So let's say $4K for two.

I'm spending far over $1K/month (employer-paid) on cloud AI, so if that could be anywhere near comparable we're only looking at less than a few months break-even.

Less really, because some months are more expensive. This month I'm up to ~$500 and it is only day 4 of this month.

But after all those years you’d still have 2 3090s, which are now about 6 years old and still holding value.

I keep seeing this comment. This is _hacker news_ where, back in the day, people just hacked on things, because it was a hobby. They weren't "moneymaxxing" or desperately trying to be as insanely efficient as possible. They hacked on stuff with a can of surge at 3am because it was fun.

Your comment is like a meta comment of "LLMs are generating everything, after a while the ouroboros will eat itself. (Which I agree with)" If people aren't hacking on this shit just because, you have completely conceded control of software to a handful of sociopaths, and open source software is dead.