On the computation side, all of the benefits of cloud computing has made it super easy. The resources of stuff like colab, weights and biases, etc definitely mean you should not buy your own hardware. It's just way too expensive to maintain professionals to do that when all of the large players essentially act as a way to pool resources and have on demand compute. Compute is also just getting cheaper now that cryptocurrency is moving to proof of stake, and there's a lot of hardware looking for stuff to do. Of course you could try to build out your own computers and lab data center, now that it's probably cheap to but again, why go through the headache.