And what you describe can also happen partially, where a model is developed offline that "learns to learn" or simply pretrained on data that's likely to be representative, and then this is placed on the embedded system that has a much simpler learning task or just starts out much closer to optimal.

But I think you nailed it with the last sentence. I need the Scooby Doo meme, where it's "AI on a wearable embedded computer" revealed to have been a Kalman filter all along.