The part of an AI system that applies what it knows, whether logical rules or a trained model's weights, to new inputs to reach a conclusion.
The Inference Engine is the runtime environment where the AI model generates its predictions or text. Private AI deployments need optimized inference engines (such as vLLM or TensorRT-LLM) to maximize throughput, minimize latency, and make efficient use of the GPU's memory bandwidth during generation.
See also Private AI, Air-Gapped Environment, Role-Based Access Control and Zero Trust Architecture.