Open source AI crossed into production infrastructure territory by Aug 2026. The real technical challenge everyone glosses over: running 400B+ parameter models on self-hosted infra is fundamentally a distributed compute problem, not a single-machine deployment. You can't just spin up one beefy node and call it done—you need orchestration across multiple GPUs/nodes, handling model sharding, tensor parallelism, and network bottlenecks. This is where the gap between "works on my laptop" and "runs at scale" becomes painfully obvious.