No. There is no outbound path for your content. Gridlight is designed to run with no internet connection at all.
Yes — denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited connectivity is the baseline design assumption, not an edge case. A site or platform that goes fully dark keeps running at full capability; there is no "call home" the system depends on.
A single, reasonably modern computer. A graphics card makes it faster but isn't required — most evaluations begin on hardware the organization already has.
Yes — a strong fit for remote or power-constrained sites, handling search, classification, and transcription efficiently. Pair with a GPU or a well-specified CPU machine for large-model workloads at that site.
Work moves to another machine automatically. In a grid, losing one node reduces capacity — it doesn't cause an outage.
Yes, through fine-tuning, which produces a small adapter reflecting your domain and terminology — trained on your material, inside your network.
By the compute capacity you run, not by usage. Costs do not rise as adoption does — an appropriations-friendly model built for fixed budgets.