alt Hacker NewsSurvival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library that runs on your own computer
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Just few days ago I thought digital preppers are soon gonna make something like that. It's a generally good idea.
I'd put in this also a ton of software documentation, minimally for Rust.
And a bunch of scientific literature.
I can almost guarantee you that by the time you need a survival assistant, you won't be willing to spend gasoline on generating electricity for your GPUs.
(It's helpful for shorter outages. But "survival assistant", I think not, unless you run a compound)
Talos Principle vibes.
This will come in handy after AI takes over the world.
But kidding aside, this is an interesting reveal on the ease with which a custom LLM can be spun up to fit a particular niche application, especially for systems not meant to host an LLM.
if your computer doesnt work during an emergency because power went out, how will your LLM work?
If you're actually offline and need information in a 'survival' situation, I'm not so sure the hallucinatory nature of an LLM is the based way to distribute a repository of information. Additionally, there's no need to fit an LLM entirely in memory.
In a theoretical scenario where the internet is gone and isn't coming back: If you can deal with a very low token/second rate there's no reason not to store 'offline' a much larger model like qwen 3.8-flash-next or deepseek v4 flash 1017 and use an inference engine which can stream-read it off disk to extract the information you want, albeit slowly. Of course also download and use things that'll fit in RAM, sure, like the qwen 3.8 27B in the linked page. But no need to restrict yourself to only smaller models.
How on earth are you going to operate this if you have no electricity?
Please, please do not trust a chatbot in emergencies. There’s a reason why actual survival and emergency preparedness guides include manuals rather than recommend you just use a chatbot: practicality.
Just look at those specs needed for accurate-ish results. You really think your 128GB Mac Studio or Framework desktop is going to be able to work in a real emergency situation? Even if it is, how long will it last? What about those precious seconds waiting for inference?
The danger here is less hallucinations and more, well, everything else about it. Instead of setting this up, take the time to make sure you have a restocked first aid kit and enough water for a week of use by your household. Stock up on meds and non-perishable food. Plan exit strategies and contingencies. Acquire and store little first aid booklets or manuals of common survival tasks in physical form (or hell, throw onto an eReader - infinitely more battery life than an LLM host in an emergency).
This is one of those “sounds good in my head” projects that folks with emergency experience would bristle at. This is a hindrance, not a helper.
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No thanks, I'll use a generic model along with trusted sources.
Also: "Apple could not verify “Survival LLM” is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy." This is obviously some vibe coded trash from an inexperienced dev.
It's disappointing that Gemma E4B seems to perform poorly on this (42% accuracy according to the GitHub). It would be nice if a $25 phone could be loaded up with this and stuffed in a EMP proof metal box with a small solar charger. Maybe a finetune or Gemma 5 will get us there.