But a week of TPUv3-128 is anywhere between $10k and $20k in TPU costs alone; saying that this is an "at home" kind of experiment is cheeky at best, clickbait at worst.
Yeah I totally get your point about the title—the TPU quota that I got was close to about the equivalent of $20k—but in my defense I don't have any other access to compute beyond anything that I get through the TFRC or through google colab
Speaking as a hobbyist, earlier if you had enough determination you could create just about any software if you kept hacking at it long enough. CPU or cost was generally not an issue, your time and tenacity was.
This has now unfortunately changed and innovation in software (esp ML) is now largely more about how deep are you pockets are.
The time that went into this project was almost certainly worth more than $10k.
If your hobby is building AI/ML models, a one-shot trained model isn’t going to really help you on an ongoing basis. It’s an amazing single shot project, but if your hobby is actually ML then you probably aren’t going to be happy just looking at your completed trained model - you are going to want to train a bigger, better model.
And if your hobby is building software, you can just download a pre-trained model for free.
I don’t think the analogy holds the other way.
It's not comparable to a hobby. It's comparable to paying $10k to make a sandwich.