Based on my admittedly limited research, it seems like you should use Laya for much more deterministic tasks where you have some training data. It won't be as good as Jev for zero shot cases.
I think it can make a lot of sense to make a set with jev and then train laya on that set and do the rest with laya for saving $
I did that on a little macbook m4 last night on my model of the innate immune system—fine tuning took 15m or so. Just wish it had a larger context window
How about runpod
No need—small and light enough was able to do everything offline, though runpod would work fine, though it‘d be be a quick job