Title: Discussion 3 — Would You Rent a GPU?
Course: AIINFRA 100: AI Systems & Development Environments > Section: Week 03 — Computational Resources: CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, and VRAM

💬 Discussion 3 — Would You Rent a GPU? (20 pts)

Imagine you want to build a small personal AI project — for example, fine-tuning a tiny model to write in your own writing style, or running a chatbot that answers questions about your favorite hobby. Based on this week's lecture:

- Would your project need a GPU at all, or would a CPU be enough? Explain your reasoning using the "Do You Need a GPU?" table from the lecture.
- If you decided you do need a GPU, would you buy one, or rent cloud GPU time (Colab, AWS, GCP, Lambda, RunPod)? What tradeoffs (cost, convenience, one-time vs. ongoing use) influenced your answer?
- Name one way you could avoid wasting cloud spend on a GPU you didn't actually need.

Post your original response, then respond to at least two classmates — try to engage with a project idea different from your own, and offer a specific reason you agree or disagree with their CPU/GPU decision.