Lesson 14The Five Places Models Live
Welcome to Module 9: Deployment — shorter than most and intensely practical. A model has to live somewhere, and there are exactly five addresses. Here they are on one line, from most convenient to most constrained:
The two arrows are the whole module: every rightward step buys control, privacy, and offline operation by paying in capability and convenience. The first three stations you've visited (Topics 11, 37, 40); today we cover what's new at each and go all the way right.
In this lesson
- 68Local Inferencefrom running models to *shipping* themYou run models locally every week now — Ollama, MLX, GGUF, the Topic 34 formula. So this topic addresses the version of "local" that's…3 min
- 69On-Device AIphones, NPUs, and the OS as router"On-device" sounds like "local, smaller" — but phones are a genuinely different regime, ruled by three constraints desktops ignore: battery…3 min
- 70API Servingthe production shellYou know the engine (vLLM, Topic 37/41) and the economics (Topic 36). What Module 4 didn't cover is the shell — everything between the…3 min
- 71Cloud GPUsthe rental market, decodedEverything self-hosted or trained runs on rented silicon, and the rental market has a structure worth learning once. Two tiers of landlord:…3 min
- 72Edge AI Basicsthe far end of the spectrumPast phones lies edge AI: inference on hardware at the data source — cameras, sensors, robots, kiosks, vehicles, factory controllers. The…4 min
Start with Topic 68: Local Inference, or browse all 90 topics.