> I'm still waiting for a general purpose, high performance "image recognizer" that I can just import as a library and run locally.

I wonder what additional criteria you must have for such a tool, because that description sounds like something which has been possible for years already. For example, I wrote this back in 2017:

https://github.com/jbruestle/plaidvision

> in 10 years we will actually see some more low-cost energy efficient specialized chips built into computer designs

Earlier this week, Intel announced that all Meteor Lake CPUs will include a Movidius VPU coprocessor.