Guide
Edge inference: why on-device latency is a different problem.
Why inference at the edge is bound by latency and reliability, not just throughput, and what that means for how it’s engineered.
Edge inference means running a trained model's forward pass on the device itself, not a server. For most cloud AI, the metric that matters is average latency across many requests.
For edge inference on a machine, the metric that matters is worst-case latency on the single request in front of it right now. A factory arm or an autonomous vehicle can't average out a slow frame.