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…