As soon as Llama came out I had a realization what was coming and went all-in on hardware with the assumption open source would catch up with GPT4. Surprise, it did, we now have small models that absolutely crush GPT4 in performance.

It wasn’t that absurdly expensive for a hobby, I bought 64GB DDR4 ECC sticks between $70-$100 on eBay before everything took off. Now everyone is in here debating if open source is 1 month or 3 months behind SOTA. The future is obviously local.