I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

I don’t really get why anyone would be buying ai compute unless A) to your goal is to rent out the compute B) no vendor can rent you enough compute when you need it C) you have an exotic funding arrangement that makes compute capex cheap and opex expensive.

Unless you can keep your compute at 70% average utilization for 5 years - you will never save money purchasing your hardware compared to renting it.

Why do people buy gaming PCs when it's much cheaper to use streaming platforms? I think the two cases share practically the same parallels in terms of reliability, availability, restrictions, flexibility, sovereignty, privacy, etc.

But also when it comes to Vast/RunPod it can be annoying and genuinely become more expensive if you have to rent 2x the number of hours because you constantly have to upload and download data, checkpoints, continuous storage costs, transfer data to another server because the GPU is no longer available, etc. It's just less of a headache if you have an always available GPU with a hard drive plugged into the machine and that's it