Depends on exactly what “prototyping” means to you.

For just pushing layers around and stuff it’s fine because you can just use CPU and verify that your model compiles and batches flow, etc etc.

For like “train for 5 epochs and tweak hyperparams” it’s tough. You can wait out CPU-only training. Or sometimes you can use the GPU in pytorch and that’s great when it works. But like, the pytorch LSTM layer is literally implemented wrong on MPS (that’s what the M1 GPU is called, equivalent to “CUDA”). So you’ll get shape errors lol.

Basically it’s fairly unstable to train on anything but CPU.