Huh?

If your aim is to truly 'get started' with ML then hardware is absolutely not a bottleneck (either local or cloud).

Remember that ML is much more than LLMs. Even modern day LLMs can be quantized to a point where they can run on local hardware although their capabilities won't be as impressive.

I would recommend looking into some of Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want a grasp of the basics.