Seven products, and four of them want a model doing something that is
not allowed to leave the device.
Alpha Gallery already computes perceptual hashes, a blur score and
event grouping on the phone, because the promise is that no photograph is
ever uploaded to be looked at. Alpha Health decodes lab reports and writes
a week in review. Alpha Match plans the logistics of a date and is
forbidden from writing anyone’s messages. Alpha Wealth reads
receipts.
None of that is calling an API and pasting the answer back. The
interesting constraint is that most of it has to run on a mid-range
Android phone, inside an install budget, with no server that has ever seen
the input.
What you would be doing
- Choose, shrink and ship models that run on the device — quantisation, distillation, and knowing when a classical algorithm beats a model outright
- Decide honestly what cannot run locally, and design the opt-in for the times it genuinely has to leave
- Own quality end to end: the eval set, the failure cases, and the thing people actually complain about
What we would expect
- You have shipped inference on a phone, not only in a notebook
- Python for the training side, and enough Dart, Kotlin or Swift to own the part that ships
- You can say “a model is the wrong tool here” and mean it
A bad fit if: You want to work on frontier training runs, or you want the model to be the product. Here it is a feature inside something else, and the something else matters more.