Anyone who remembers the 90s and 2000s, where your computer hardware was out of date within months, might disagree. If you want to do bleeding edge things like running 70b+ LLMs locally or doing training, you need bleeding edge hardware. No different than if you want to play the newest AAA games. There are plenty of games you can play with old hardware, and plenty of small LLMs. When you can use ChatGPT or a bunch of other services, it isn’t a trick that some people want to host their own or do training, but you need a system that can do that.