As someone who actually owns an M1 and has a job running large models in the cloud - it's not nearly as bad as I was expecting. mps support in pytorch is growing every day, most recently I have been able to finetune various sentence transformers and GPT-J at reasonable speeds (before pushing to gpus in the cloud). If I was choosing the laptop I would go with linux + gpu obviously, but our mostly clueless executive chose the M1. The upside with the M1 is that I can use the 64gb of system memory for loading models whereas the most gpu memory I could get in a nvidia laptop is 16-24.