Lesson 70 · 2 min
Where AI actually runs
Most AI answers come from huge data centers far away, while some smaller AI runs right on your phone or laptop.
When you type into a big chatbot, your message travels over the internet to a data center: a warehouse full of powerful chips. The answer is worked out there and sent back in a moment.
Some AI runs on your own device instead. Phones and laptops now have chips built for it, and they handle things like photo search, live captions, voice typing and short summaries. This is called edge AI.
Each place has trade-offs. Data centers run the largest, smartest models but need a connection, and your words leave your device. On-device AI is quicker for small jobs, works offline and keeps data with you, but its models are smaller.
Many products mix the two, doing easy work locally and sending harder requests to the cloud. If privacy matters for a task, check the app's settings or help page to see where your data goes.
Do it now
Test what works offline
- 1. Switch your phone to airplane mode.
- 2. Try voice typing, photo search (search your gallery for "dog" or "beach") and a chatbot app.
- 3. Note which ones still work. Those use AI on your device.
Quick check
Keep going
Next →When a relative's voice is a copyWords from this lesson
- Edge AI
- AI that runs directly on a phone, camera or other device instead of on distant servers, so data can stay local.
- GPU
- A chip that does huge numbers of small calculations at once. First built for video games, now the main engine for AI.
- Inference
- The moment a trained model is actually used to produce an answer, as opposed to the earlier learning phase.