How to Make AI Work When You Don’t Have Big Tech Money

Photo by Igor Omilae on Unsplash Sometimes the best new ideas are born when constraints are loudest. You may have felt it yourself. That tug-of-war between the enormous promise of AI and the hard limitations of small budgets, restricted infrastructure, or simply needing to ship something that works today, not tomorrow. Big tech companies throw most efficient inference system at their models; for the rest of us the startups and the nimble builders model distillation is the quiet engine that makes AI workable, affordable, and genuinely useful.