I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

I thought the conclusion should have been obvious: A cluster of Raspberry Pi units is an expensive nerd indulgence for fun, not an actual pathway to high performance compute. I don’t know if anyone building a Pi cluster actually goes into it thinking it’s going to be a cost effective endeavor, do they? Maybe this is just YouTube-style headline writing spilling over to the blog for the clicks.

If your goal is to play with or learn on a cluster of Linux machines, the cost effective way to do it is to buy a desktop consumer CPU, install a hypervisor, and create a lot of VMs. It’s not as satisfying as plugging cables into different Raspberry Pi units and connecting them all together if that’s your thing, but once you’re in the terminal the desktop CPU, RAM, and flexibility of the system will be appreciated.

The author, Jeff Geerling, is a very intelligent person. He has more experience with using niche hardware than almost anyone on earth. If he does something, there's usually a good a priori rationale for it.

Jeff is a good person/blogger and does interesting projects but more experience with niche hardware than literally anyone is a stretch.

Like what about the people who maintain the alpha/sparc/parisc linux kernels? Or the designers behind idk tilera or tenstorrent hardware.