Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because with support for M1 you can prototype your network on your local machine with „good“ performance. There are many cloud solutions etc. but for convenience nothing beats your local machine. You can use an IDE you like etc.
Because contrary to what you believe, M1 simply is not performant enough to be used to "prototype" your network. NNs can't be simply scaled up and down. It is *NOT* like those web apps which you can run on potatoes just fine as long as nobody are hitting them heavily.
I like to start a new project by prototyping and debugging my training and cunning config code, setting up the data loading and evaluation pipeline, hacking around with some baseline models and making sure they can overfit some small subset of my data
After all that’s done it’s finally time to scale out to the gpu cluster. But I still do a lot of debugging locally
Maybe this kind of workflow isn’t as necessary if you have a task that’s pretty plug and play like image classification, but for nonstandard tasks I think there’s lots of prototyping work that doesn’t require hardware acceleration