I was wondering - I've been thinking about switching to AI systems programming (I know, easy task), but from what I understand, industry cloud GPUs are the main winners, right? Nobody's going to pay me (assuming I even had the skills) to optimize for consumer GPUs?
From what I understand, it's not just number + capacity + performance, it's literal core primitives. I don't think any of the "Blackwell" chips like the grace one or rtx 5090 have for example SM pairs in their ISA? And likewise similar fundamental differences between consumer and cloud hopper (where the majority of the perf is the cloud one's ISA?)
So I guess I'm wondering if I should buy a GPU myself or should I just rent on the cloud if I wanted to start getting some experience in this field. How do you even get experience in this normally anyways, do you get into really good schools and into their AI labs which have a lot of funding?
semiinfinitely•1h ago