An individual could afford computing power for such research activities (not exactly like this one, but e.g. for personal ML experiments) in 2018-2019 for an adequate price. You were able to buy 2 new RTX2080s for the today price of a used single unit. If you want to tinker and need GPU power today, your best option is to rent special datacenter-approved(tm) GPUs for the really expensive $/h. And you don't own anything afterwards (except if you bought GPU before the end of 2020). Does this make no sense? Is this how technological progress should work?