I didn’t take a year fully off but last year was slow in my consulting work so I did a deep dive on the emerging LLM area. One recommendation - get a beefy Mac

I didn’t take a year fully off but last year was slow in my consulting work so I did a deep dive on the emerging LLM area. One recommendation - get a beefy Mac laptop so you can run LLM’s locally. I got an M2 with 96G RAM. Makes a huge difference to your thinking about LLM’s when you can run your own and integrated it with little tasks here and there for experimenting. Else I find most people think only of centralized closed LLM’s when they think of what’s possible. Severely limiting. /r/LocalLlama on Reddit is a great community. Other than that check out llama.cpp and ggml.cpp and the whole ecosystem around that. Cheers and good luck. Ping me on DM if you want more pointers.