- Wed 03 June 2026
- Meta
The AI Stack I Actually Run in 2026: A Laptop iGPU and Four Rented Frontiers
The most interesting thing about AI in 2026 is not which frontier model wins this month’s benchmark. It is that the frontier became a commodity you rent through near-interchangeable clients, while the part with actual craft in it moved onto the integrated Radeon 780M in my laptop. Here is the tiered stack I actually run, with the local layer in detail because that is the unusual part, and the cloud layer kept brief because the pricing is on the vendors’ own pages and will be wrong by autumn.