Actually, I've been toying around with doing just that.

https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat

Given the surplus of power from solar I have, my set up (discussed elsewhere), I can run the training process end to end over about 50 days. It could be fun to make something truly bespoke from scratch.

Returning to my prior example - it was only overkill for this task (and only because the problem turned out to be relatively simple), but I wanted to answer against the claim that people were using LLMs and agents for just programming.

The example I cited IS silly, but it happened - IRL - 3 days ago. I can cite several much more "serious" use cases if you'd like.

On the broader topic of costs: none of us can really comprehend the embedded costs in the things we use everyday.

However unlike (say) the recurring embedded costs of buying bottled water, a cup of coffee or streaming a movie, the costs of my set up are paid once and pay off multiple times.

Ultimately, I get why there's a FuckAI sentiment... but really we should expand that to "Fuck Corpo AI". My feeling is that it's not AI that people are against per se, it's the corpos and what they're doing with them. Too much of that gets flattened and tribal.

The "true cost" argument only holds if you assume the only valid infrastructure is someone else's. I don't make that assumption, and I'd say that neither do others in the enthusiast community.