By skyforbes 
I was laid off, broke, and curious — here’s how I built real AI-backed product without owning a single GPU.
1. The Wake-Up Call Nobody Warns You About
Let me be real with you — getting laid off hit harder than I expected.
I wasn’t just losing a paycheck; I was losing access — to tools, to courses, to even the computational power I needed to keep up with the AI boom.
And I’d been obsessed with AI long before it became a buzzword. My first spark? Watching i-Robot. I didn’t even know back then that what fascinated me — that human-machine intelligence — would someday define my entire career pivot.
Fast forward to post-layoff: I had curiosity, but no compute power, no budget, and no access to premium AI toolkits. Testing models in Jupyter notebooks felt like hitting a wall. Everything cost per token. Every experiment ate into my savings.
It was frustrating — but it also forced me to get smart.
2. The Shift: From “Building From Scratch” to “Building Smart”
At some point, I had to stop romanticizing the idea of “building from the ground up.”
I didn’t need another custom-trained model — I needed something that worked now.