I feel this is going into increasingly-unlikely mixes of constraints and needs in order to try to keep a "wouldn't it be cool if" hypothetical-tool dream alive. [0]

But OK, let's assume that: The power is out, but you have a generator with so much fuel you can run a desktop just fine; Your neighborhood will somehow make a mesh network; Your neighbors need some already stored information and the best solution for that is texting a chatbot rather than a survival/emergency handbook or Wikipedia; Your mesh-network will also be good enough to match the time-sensitivity of the questions.

Under those assumption, which of these sounds better?

1. Buying an "LLM-in-a-box for emergency supply kits", which you deploy so that your neighbors can ask questions (text over the mesh) of the offline chatbot.

2. Buying a satellite internet transciever for your emergency supply kit, so that your neighbors can ask questions of a much better chatbot and communicate with human experts, their worried relatives, and coordinate with rescue/relief efforts...

[0] https://xkcd.com/2128/

▲

zmgsabst a day ago | parent [-]

Option 1 sounds better:

I’m only out the cost of the drive, which is like $40 and doesn’t require anybody on the other side cooperate with me.

- - -

More broadly…

You call it unlikely mixes, but we see it all the time:

- people already have a computer for gaming or work

- people (ie, “preppers” like we’re discussing) buy a generator for emergencies

- local emergency response sets up mesh networking during disasters, both official and unofficial

Have you ever tried to use a handbook you’re not intimately familiar with during an emergency? It’s rough.

For personal preparedness, nothing replaces familiarity and practice — eg, weekend survival trips and reading your manual ahead of time.

But for providing information in a random lookup manner to unpracticed people who weren’t prepared? Yes, I think an LLM/chatbot is the practical way to operationalize all that information which you stored (eg, survival guides or machine manuals).

Also, it’s unlikely a general purpose chatbot would be superior at survival advice to one specialized for that purpose — and indeed, is likely to refuse your questions as “unsafe” or “criminal”.

	▲	swiftcoder a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I’m only out the cost of the drive, which is like $40 and doesn’t require anybody on the other side cooperate with me. At current prices you are also out about $4k for a Spark to actually run the inference on, if you want a full LLM in a low-power package. In general, I'm not sure why one would want to pin your survival to an expensive, hallucination-prone data source, when an offline copy of wikipedia with a little vector search attached to a Raspberry Pi can fulfil the same role...
	▲	root_axis 20 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Have you ever tried to use a handbook you’re not intimately familiar with during an emergency? It’s rough. Sounds like the absolute worst time to rely on a crappy little model that will inevitably hallucinate.