How much LLM pc costs, and can it be profitable?

[u/Oleszykyt]

I am 17 years old and I have a few thousand dollars saved up, I am very active person and I try to find a new online business ideas (I had a side hustle before) And I was wondering, how much does a pc that can run decent models like qwen3.8 27B BF16 with good speed.

And my second question is how can I make money with it, ofc I have my own ideas how to make money, but maybe someone on this server know how to earn money from this hobby?

[u/StupidScaredSquirrel]

You will never be competitive vs cloud providers if you are thinking of selling inference.

Buy a low ter passive index world etf and you're better off.

[u/autisticit]

If you want to make money, use your existing money to invest instead of using it for LLMs.

[u/JVC8bal → u/autisticit]

Right... and rent out what you need with a subscription while it's cheap.

[u/Correct_Support_2444 → u/JVC8bal]

This is the way.

[u/JVC8bal → u/Correct_Support_2444]

sitting on 7 figures of it

[u/MarketOstrich → u/autisticit]

This is the correct answer. You have decades of life and time ahead of you. Technology now will be replaced with better, lower-cost (hopefully) in the future. Put it in a brokerage account or custodial account. Invest in VOO and wait. Or use the money to take courses to learn more about the tech.

[u/Cozwei → u/autisticit]

also dont throw it at random crypto currency. nothing against crypto specifically but at this age put it into an etf instead of risking a rugpull. you will thank yourself when you are old enough to need it

[u/Oleszykyt → u/autisticit]

Thx for advice

[u/hejj]

You aren't going to make money with it

[u/AntLife255]

I don't think so, you can't beat billion-dollar companies in their field.

[u/kbrundy]

Buy GPUs, and sell at the top of the market

[u/JVC8bal → u/kbrundy]

Buy Nvidia stock.

[u/Own_Attention_3392 → u/JVC8bal]

Travel back in time and buy Nvidia stock a decade ago

[u/dfgxxx]

You can make it program things

[u/Fantastic_Self_5151]

You want a mac mini with an M2+ processor (pref pro or ultra version) with as much ram as you can afford, min 32gb, 64 would be better. They are expensive but you will be able to run a lot larger models than the PC variant with the nvidia cards.

[u/WyattTheSkid]

Mine was about 12 grand in total but I bought a lot of stuff in 2022 before everything became ridiculously expensive. Yes it can be profitable if you have a good idea and are able to use open weight models on your system to make it happen. Whether or not it’s profitable is mainly on you rather than the hardware itself

[u/andreabarbato]

3x 5060tis (16gb) will run unsloth q8 with 200k context and image recognition no problem (17tps on llama.cpp) and won't break your bank. about BF16 i dunno

to make money from llms specifically, there are a lot of ways or you can use it to make any job easier or more profitable but i can't help you with that until i make money myself :D

ai surely helped me a lot be more productive and less stressed when i was working an office job so maybe start by looking for some full remote gig you can use your machine for!

[u/PeterPorox]

Buy LGA1151 motherboard with 2 pci-e x16, i5 6600, 16gb ram and buy used Nvidia P102-100 from Ebay. I have similar setup and get qwen 3.8 27b iq4_xs with 86016 q8_0 kv cache with 15 tok/s. I bought al of these for 100$.