Small models, big shift: why on-device AI is finally viable

Shrinking models and smarter chips mean your phone can now do what used to require a data center. Distillation, quantization, and dedicated neural silicon have converged to make a genuinely useful model fit in a few hundred megabytes.

The practical upshot: features that once needed a round trip to the cloud — transcription, translation, image search — now run locally, instantly, and privately. Expect the next wave of apps to treat connectivity as optional rather than assumed.