I see comments here about running Llama on 4090's, which is fine for local development and testing - but getting into production is a significant leap and a significant cost.

The thing that I keep running into in my SLA plans is concurrency. Yes, you can have a Llama 2 model running on an A100 somewhere - but that will support 1 concurrent prompt. Anything at a higher concurrency needs another GPU, or your end users will be waiting a while. Want to rent an 8 GPU machine in the cloud for inference? Be prepared to pay a lot of money for it.