Scaling AI Inference: Why Your Demo Works but Production Doesn't

Most AI teams successfully build impressive RAG demos but struggle when moving to production, facing hallucinations, cost escalation, and resource underutilization. DigitalOcean's latest tutorials directly address these pain points, covering retrieval quality issues, the serverless-vs-dedicated tradeoff, model versioning risks, and GPU bottlenecks that most developers overlook. For teams deploying AI systems beyond prototypes, understanding these architectural decisions is critical for avoiding costly failures in production.