I've built hardware with a pi zero 2 + pi cam running a mildly fine-tuned YOLO doing local-only object detection as a USB-OTG device, in a use case where any off-device API calls would have been totally unacceptable, and where the object detection was part of the human interaction loop with a hard ceiling of 300ms on the total interaction time of which the object detection was only one process among many.

We're not going to fit Nano Banana or anything like it on a device with 512MB RAM and a GPU old enough to be irrelevant, and again, API calls just aren't on the menu.

> API calls just aren't on the menu

Even if they were an option, your 300ms latency requirement would exclude them anyway.