Inference only. I’m looking into doing some fine tuning. Training from scratch is another story.

I’ve run an LLM on my desktop GPU and gotten decent results, albeit not nearly as good as what ChatGPT will get you.

Probably used less than 0.1Wh per response.

You’ll feel right at home in the command line. Install Homebrew or MacPorts. These are command line package managers. Many if not most of the software tools you are used to on Linux likely have Mac versions as well and you can find them either online or via one of those package managers.

If you are going to download software from Apple’s Apple Store, you will need to make an account. You can install software directly from the internet without needing an account. You might need to tweak some “security settings” in System Preferences to run software not from the App Store.

Unfortunately Xcode is something you need an Apple account to install. However, the Xcode “command line tools”, which includes a lot of common tools like gcc, I believe you can install by running “xcode-select --install” from the command line even without an account. There might also be other ways to get those tools installed manually / not through Apple

If you just want an IDE and really want to avoid making an account, just use VSCode or something. But if you will need to develop Mac apps using Apple’s APIs, it will likely be easier at the very least to work in Xcode. And if you are going to develop for any of Apple’s other operating systems (like iOS) you will need to make an account.