02 Promised Land, Deferred: The Hard Limits Blocking Local AI Inference for Independent Developers
The vision of private, on-device AI inference has captured the imagination of developers across the United States, but the gap between that promise and practical deployment remains vast. Hardware constraints, fragmented tooling, and economic realities conspire to keep truly local AI out of reach for most individual builders and smaller teams. This investigation examines where the friction actually lives — and what it will take to close the distance.