> Enormous numbers of consumers own $50,000 cars, but a pair of $2000 GPUs is "not consumer"?

$50k is a median priced car in the US. I'd guess >99.9% of people do not own $4000 of GPUs. I consider myself a computer person and I dont think I even own $4000 of computer hardware in total

> I consider myself a computer person and I dont think I even own $4000 of computer hardware in total

A top-spec MacBook Pro is >$4k, so I assure you that plenty of computer people do own $4k of computer hardware.

Hell, most tech folks are wandering around with a ~$1k smartphone in their pocket too.

Fwiw you can finance a car over something like 7 years now. So a lot of people will be paying like $750 per month, not $50k lump sum.

Plenty of gamers own serious GPU rigs that are reusable (at least to some extent) for local AI inference. That's almost certainly more than 0.1% of the populatiom.

I guess I wasn't clear-- I wasn't so much making the point people do own $4000 in GPUs (though I suspect you are massively underestimating the number who do, also before the current market conditions this would have been more like $2500 in gpus...), but they certainly could per the evidence of car ownership.

A car is super useful, so is an AI. But even if we decide cars are incomparably more useful a great many people pay much more than $4000 over the minimum viable car, and that's money that could be deployed to secure access to private, secure, and autonomous AI facilities. A few thousand dollars in computing is consumer hardware, or at least could easily be with more reason and awareness driving adoption.

People spend a LOT of money in things less useful than local copy of qwen3.6-27b can be.