The a16z Show · Monday, September 7, 2026
Lucas Kaiser highlighted how advancements in personal GPU technology are enabling individual researchers to conduct experiments that were previously only possible for large, well-funded teams. He noted that while training large language models is still out of reach for single GPUs, research and experimentation are now more accessible.
“I recently started doing things on my own also. And it's funny, so I bought a 3090 RTX GPU. It has more power than the 8x GPU machines we used as a team to do the transformers research.”
“So you can buy and have one GPU that has all the power we used to design transformer. So, you know, so you can do things with it. Like you can't train a big L M, but you can research and experiment on things. And I think many people should.”