ABOUT THIS EPISODE
It's the Halloween edition, which means a pirate, a horse, a lederhosen enthusiast, a mountain man and an NYPD captain spent 49 minutes having a genuinely good conversation about edge AI. Everyone showed up in costume and immediately started introducing each other as each other. It goes downhill from there, in the best way.
Our guest is Mike McGinley, a Surface device specialist who sells to some of the largest banks in the world. He also got stopped on Fifth Avenue by a casting director who was looking for, and we quote, an older heavier set Irish retired New York City police officer. He is now in a Paramount+ miniseries. He has a SAG card. He was in roughly 50 commercials as a kid, including one for a Pogo Ball. We have the footage.
Somewhere in between the costumes we actually did the show. Jacob is back from GitHub Universe where they had a DGX Station with 748 gigabytes of memory pushing 19 million tokens of context. Neil talks about wiring up Boeing airplane parts with Raspberry Pis in college and building a restaurant that set its prices based on whether the Cubs were in town. Frank found a company putting fire-detecting AI on tiny sensors in the forest. Chauncey found a robot duck. And the 128GB RTX Spark SKUs are already sold out.
The thread running through all of it: the T-shirt sizes keep getting bigger on both ends. A phone doing transcription on one side, a $100,000 edge server running trillion parameter models on the other, and the same question underneath. Where should the intelligence actually live?
Plus a demo of Ride Edge, Frank's app that reads 23 API feeds and tells him where to park his car to find Uber riders. Yes, it runs on the workstation behind him. Yes, he hijacked his own podcast to show it.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open: from sensors to servers
0:50 Halloween edition, and nobody knows who they are
5:00 Meet Mike McGinley
6:00 The casting director on Fifth Avenue
8:00 A SAG card, 50 commercials, and the Pogo Ball
10:00 Relationship selling when every dollar gets scrutinized
13:00 Beyond cost savings: why banks actually want local
15:00 Jacob returns from GitHub Universe
16:00 748GB and 19 million tokens of context
17:00 The 128GB Sparks are sold out
18:00 Sam Altman thinks your DRAM is selfish
18:30 Tiny sensors that spot forest fires
19:00 Flock cameras, again
20:00 Boeing parts, Raspberry Pis, and the restaurant of the future
22:00 Why always-on workloads break the token model
23:00 DEMO: Ride Edge, 23 API feeds, one workstation
26:00 Proving the device pays for itself
27:00 Retail branches and shelf restocking
28:00 The Pixel deal that paid for the phones in weeks
31:00 MicroDuck, and open sourcing a robot
33:00 Finding weld spatter on a car body, locally
35:00 You can't put a price tag on innovation
37:00 Bank of New York builds its own colo
39:00 T-shirt sizes get an XXL
40:00 From "we won't touch DeepSeek" to "we prefer Qwen"
42:00 Neil's offline PowerPoint generator at 35,000 feet
43:00 Around the horn: what everyone's working on
47:00 Snapdragon X2 vs RTX Spark
49:00 Yarr
ABOUT THE SHOW
the localhost is an ongoing podcast about AI that runs on your own hardware. Open weight models, NPUs, workstations, sensors, home labs, and the question underneath all of it: who controls intelligence, you or a data center?
The crew: Chauncey Larsen and Jacob Rhoades of the Microsoft Surface Marketing team. Neil Misak of the Microsoft Surface Engineering AI Solution Factory. Robert Henry, Windows specialist, and not a salesman, as we have now been told. And Frank Buchholz, retired tech guy, now vibe coding, Uber driving, and unapologetic Chappell Roan and Phoebe Bridgers fan.
This week's guest: Mike McGinley, Surface device specialist, Bergen County's finest, and soon to be on your television.
DISCLOSURE
All opinions expressed on this show belong to the individual hosts and do not represent the views or positions of Microsoft or any other organization. We speak for ourselves and nobody else.
New episodes weekly.
https://thelocalhost.show
