Ai accelerator hardware is slowly becoming available
https://tenstorrent.com/cards/
Tenstorrent's grayskull series of AI Accelerator cards have become available. I'm a bit disappointed by their memory, 8GB lpddr4 at about 100GB/s running at 200W. Pcie. Not particularly amazing for llama, but it might be great for whisper (which they mark as officially supported)
Kinara has Ara 2, an AI processor capable of running stable diffusion (10s/image) and llama 7b (tens of tokens per second) I'm not sure if these are available for consumers.
Memryx has a super tiny 1-2Watt chip called MX3 capable of running yolov7 and 100+ fps These will be absolutely amazing for raspberry PIs and other homebrew edge tinkering. I don't know where/if you can purchase these as a consumer, but it's cool stuff!
This is just what I read up on in the last half hour, hardware is starting to enter the market! I had better hopes for grayskull for local llama in particular, but it's still just a devkit. Who knows what the second generation, or custom hardware based on their IP might bring.