I work with machine learning tasks daily, both as an ML researcher and as a hobby. The difference between what I can do at work and at home is significant - an A40 at work can do far more than the 3080 I have at home. This obviously makes sense, given the massively increased price point.
However, what I find odd is how there are no consumer level server GPUs targeted towards ML on the market. The A40 is not just a scaled up consumer GPU, and with machine learning growing as a hobby, consumer and enthusiast-level server GPUs are a surprising market gap.
I do believe they wll come eventually, but right now there simply is no competition in this space. So Nvidia is in this fun spot were they can ask everyone to pay industry level prices, you simply don’t have another choice. Then why should they create a lower priced consumer ai accelerator? It would basically cut into the market of people buying the industry level ones. So sadly as long as no competitor(s) shows up to actually rival nivdia here, or the ai accelerator market gets fully saturated(not happening soon), we will not see any lower priced stuff.