Training a Lora should be significantly cheaper especially combined with deepspeed cpu offloading and training with the model in 8 bit. Can probably get it to train on consumer cards.

And yup, completely separate unless you decide to merge them with the main model weights for faster inference/training another Lora on top/etc.

Hopefully people will share around loras for all sorts of plug and play personalities and finetuned abilities and it’ll be like stable diffusion but with personal assistants