I've never used it, but I think Google Colab has a free plan.

As another option, you can rent a machine with a decent GPU on vast.ai. An Nvidia 3090 can be rented for about $0.20/hr.

I am on a 2019 mac and finding it difficult too.

Best bet would be to start with a small language model?

Make yourself comfortable with

https://blogs.oracle.com/database/post/freedom-to-build-anno...

https://gist.github.com/rssnyder/51e3cfedd730e7dd5f4a816143b...

https://www.reddit.com/r/oraclecloud/

or any other offer.

Deploy some minimal Linux on them, or use what's offered.

Plus optionally, if you don't want to instantly start coding from first principles/scratch, make use of established and excellent solutions, like

https://future.mozilla.org/builders/news_insights/introducin...

https://ai-guide.future.mozilla.org/content/running-llms-loc...

https://github.com/mozilla-Ocho/llamafile

https://justine.lol/matmul/

and parallelize them with

https://github.com/b4rtaz/distributed-llama

Obviously this needs some knowledge of the command line, so get a good terminal emulator like

https://iterm2.com/

Mend, bend, rend that stuff and see what works how and why, and what not.

Edit: Optionally, if you really want to go low-level, with some debugger like

https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/

for 'toy-installations' of smallest models.

'Toy' because that doesn't fully support the CPU-instructions which are used in production.

Could still help conceptually.