At QCon London 2026, James Hall presented Running AI at the Edge: Running Real Workloads Directly in the Browser
demonstrating how browser-native inference using tools like Transformers.js, WebLLM, and WebGPU can deliver practical AI workloads without sending data to third-party cloud providers. Hall is the founder and tech director at Parallax and creator of jsPDF.
Hall opened by framing the downsides of server-side inference in concrete terms: sending prompts and user data to third parties creates privacy concerns, every request incurs network round trips that can make real-time experiences feel sluggish, and usage-based cloud inference costs rise with success rather than falling away.
He then explored the motivations for running AI locally in the browser,…