Change my mind – local AI/GPT/LLM is the best preppers tool ever

[-]

Heck_Spawn@reddit

I'm guessing this is in a universe where TEOTWAWKI allows the use of electronics afterward?

[-]

davidm2232@reddit

Why would it not? You can run a local LLM on the same PC you run your cameras/media server on. As long as it is local, it should continue to work the same as it does now

[-]

Heck_Spawn@reddit

You have emp proof electronics? Heck, the Earth's magnetic field is weakening, so a good sized solar flare could fry everything too.

[-]

An EMP is one of many possible scenarios. Depending on the EMP, most small electronics will be just fine. EMPs mostly affect the grid and anything connected to the grid. If you have your servers on a double conversion UPS, there is no risk of a grid surge from EMP damaging your electronics

[-]

Heck_Spawn@reddit

I'm completely off-grid, but I am about 210 miles from every one of our enemies primary target, I worry most about Kim's chinese knock-off guidance systems...

[-]

Ryan_e3p@reddit

LLM (large language model) is basically a knowledge base with an unreliable query language. What could be more useful for survival than all the knowledge of humanity?

Books and individual text files.

[-]

That_Frame_964@reddit

LOL ok, smart ass. You know LLMs have those books and have read them, most likely? Do you know how much of a percent it takes to read your entire 1,000 page medical book? Like you can customize your LLMs and even remove nearly all copyright restrictions from them. They have READ your book, and they can tell you on page 50 exactly what it says.

You want to carry around books and individual text files, and then come into a situation where, oh NO you don't have a text or book for that problem. Then what? What IF you can't find a book, or text? If you have a laptop with a LLM you can find thousansd and thousands of books on the subject you need and have them help you with your exact problem.

[-]

Ryan_e3p@reddit

Huh, weird that you're responding back a year later.

But is the "search" function broke on your computer? Because that can pull up text from inside files without using an LLM that will just make shit up if it can't find the answer.

I have a repository of over 50,000 text files & PDFs. I can search through them without having to run an LLM gobbling up GPU/CPU cycles.

[-]

ehhhhprobablynot@reddit

Can you share what software you use for the repository? Does it allow you to search all 50,000 of those books collectively at once?

[-]

williaty@reddit

Fail.

You have no way to know if the AI is lying to you or not. When they just make shit up, they sound every bit as confident as when they're regurgitating an answer from a trusted source.

Eventually, they'll make shit up and kill you.

[-]

That_Frame_964@reddit

That's why you need a basic understanding of, well, problem solving in general. If you lack that, a LLM can't help you. If you're gullible and take a LLM at face value and do what it says, you'll probably die if it's an important survival problem. But you have to have basic problem solving skills and also basic LLM skills. That is, KNOW how to use them, and how they work, and how to prompt properly. If an LLM gives you advice, you need to know how to prompt it again to know WHERE and WHY it suggests that.

I use LLMs for coding and at first it sucked ass, but as time went on, I learned to prompt better and now 90% of the code it spits out is usable, and we're talking thousands of lines of code that would take me WEEKS, done in a few hours. The other 10%, well, that's just my own skill. Sometimes I have NO idea what the LLM is doing with its response, in fact it spits out new things sometimes that I've never seen before. So, since I don't know, I have to query and press a few minutes to find out where and what it is doing, and sometimes it's wrong. If after that it still doesn't make sense, I will simply prompt for an alternative that DOES make sense. This is PROBLEM SOLVING.

[-]

williaty@reddit

So in that context, since I'm not writing code, what possible utility can an LLM provide me? It can't do something for me that I couldn't do myself, because I have to be able to check up on it. It can't do it faster than I can because checking its work will take me as long as just doing it myself in the first place.

[-]

ford_fuggin_ranger@reddit

Your brain is the best prepper tool ever.

Work on improving that instead of outsourcing it.

[-]

That_Frame_964@reddit

Posting this because, well, your brain can't remember all the events in human history, all the things that led up to a technological advance that, well, is a prerequisite for everything down the road, and then several ideas down the road led to X or Y. There are hundreds of thousands of ideas that result in things we have today.

You need a few things and/or skills.

A few thumb drives with EVERYTHING, OS, models, python, pip, pretty much everything all in one and ready to go, back up 2-3 times.

A laptop, and a means to repair it. This is 1 of 2 things you need to retain by memory, is how to repair laptops.

An energy source to recharge laptop and a medium understanding of solar energy and batteries.

And there you have it, you can run several specialized LLMs at 7b or 14b for more specialized tasks. Yes it will take a few minutes to get the information to you, but you can learn stuff that no normal human will remember. A good LLM will tell you how to properly build a cabin, with only basic tools, or guide you through making basic tools from, well, basic materials that are available to you. Yes, you can learn these things yourself, but contractor grade LLMs make it so you don't actually have to learn that skill.

But we're not just talking about bug out here, it's INVALUABLE for bug in situations too. It will help guide and calculate rationing of food between X or Y individuals to get the exact calories and nutrients one needs to survive for Z time.

There are medical LLMs that have every single conditions on the planet mixed in with treatments, including triage information, from HUNDREDS of thousand so of medical books and texts.

[-]

Ddog78@reddit

You kinda makes his point valid in another way. I rather like reading fiction and random stuff. A working localised LLM would be a heaven sent tool that relatively won't weigh much compared to books. It's brain stimulation.

[-]

CasualJamesIV@reddit

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. If an LLM is capable of "thinking" clearly and without emotion in stressful situations, as well as having access to everything you've ever read but just can't remember in the moment, it could prove itself to be invaluable

[-]

BooshCrafter@reddit

It's not capable. It's constantly wrong about easy survival skills. Go ask it navigation questions and it won't even know the difference between bearing and azimuth.

Wait, neither do any of you lmao, but still, it's very wrong.

[-]

ford_fuggin_ranger@reddit

That's a big if.

And your panicked human brain would still need to interface to it to use it, so you should work on improving that interface.

[-]

CasualJamesIV@reddit

I'm not disagreeing with you. If it is feasible (although reading some other comments suggests it may not be) then I see it as no different than having three ways to start a fire instead of just one. It's a redundancy like so much of what makes one a prepper

[-]

rafy709@reddit

I thought of this myself too. People are references the inaccuracies of AI on here but I think you are talking about creating a condensed LLM with several sources/books of key information that you know you can trust. I know this is a delayed comment but have you found anything out there with this specialization?

[-]

No-Cash-9530@reddit

Hey, I am a bit late to the party, sorry!

Is a locally running LLM still of interest?

I am a developer, working on something that may do what you are asking.

It will not know 'everything' it absolutely will hallucinate a lot of things. As others have suggested, it's great for soundboarding or expanding awareness of possibilities. It is not going to be a miracle solution to having very little and starving in the elements.

It could be a pretty amazing way to accumulate a personal RAG system. And if it were to become popular enough, maybe bridged into a communications system for pop up mesh networks with a built in dynamic, mini Google.

The rest of the world could be in the stone age and if you time capsules something like this with some fold up solar panels and basic battery components held stable, you would have the means to rebuild for a community very, very quickly, trading little more than motivation.

It's just an idea. But I can do it and release it open source if there is a legitament, strong interest in using it to preserve or enhance a community in some way.

On Hugging Face you can find CJJones/tech_1

That's a very slimmed down, 2.3gb of tech QA dataset custom generated for answering tech questions. A Prototype for a much bigger tech build in the wings.

It's also a precursors to a smaller models trained on much bigger data for general use cases. 20gb from CosmopediaV2 and 12 gb custom generated.

Includes conversational ability, paragraph summarization, some java coding, lots of DIY and cooking. Some text generation as well. This one could be modified to make what has been described in the original post (After the prototype is ready).

If you master use of these models, you can very easily have them automate pretty much anything.

[-]

ToddRossDIY@reddit

ChatGPT and the like will answer everything with absolute confidence even when it’s totally wrong. Even simple stuff that a computer is designed to do, math, it gets completely wrong far too often. Maybe in a few years the reliability will get to a point you can trust to not accidentally kill you, but right now it’s about as trustworthy as asking a random guy off the street

[-]

asmonix@reddit

you can literally ask these models to output code for tailor series approximation of any integral, but people will ask it about quick maths and be like "it needs few more years"

[-]

EffinBob@reddit

Or on Reddit...

[-]

ToddRossDIY@reddit

I mean they did train it on a lot of Reddit comments, could partly explain why it will tell you with absolute fact that 100+10 is 120

[-]

jaejaeok@reddit

It is only useful when things are good and parameters are clear. If you’re unsure or trying to navigate uncertainty, AI will confidently lead you to death. You also underestimate the risks of AGI and the objective a super intelligence could have in regards to humans and/or preppers specifically. It requires good faith for you to put your survival in the hands of an LLM… and with some of the worlds greatest minds urging that good faith to be questions, I’d listen.

Save information from the internet. Organize it. Print it.

[-]

Previous_Zone_8848@reddit

LLM’s like ChatGPT are nowhere close to super intelligence lol, or even AGI but that definition seems to change every other month

[-]

tvtb@reddit

There is not a downloadable LLM that includes the training model built off the entire internet. You can get LLM software that is untrained, and then give it some manageable amount of data you can download, like the entire English Wikipedia, but that is still far smaller than the entire internet. The latter is what is available when you use MS Copilot, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT on their site/apps, or Google Gemini. You can’t have that offline, which is what matters for preppers

[-]

k06a@reddit (OP)

What about LLAMA 3 70B 8Q? Its performance is comparable with ChatGPT-4.

[-]

tvtb@reddit

I don’t think you’re understanding my point. Doesn’t matter how good the software is, what gives it value is the training database it has to draw on. Those databases are huge, and created by an entire datacenter worth of AI processors that cost $40k EACH running continuously while downloading the entire internet. The models are the proprietary trade secrets.

You download Llama whatever and it doesn’t know anything yet, you have to feed into it data to train on, and then wait for your gaming GPU to do it

[-]

Dramatic-Zebra-7213@reddit

You obviously don't know what you are talking about, or haven't used said Llama. 70B parameter llama knows a ton of stuff. It can answer questions you don't have a clue about.

Just dowload LM studio an try it, it's all free. You probably don't have enough ram to run a 70 billion parameter model, which requires about 64gigs minimum, but smaller models like Llama 3 8B or Mistral 7B are surprisingly good, and will probably whip your ass on trivia questions.

[-]

orcishlifter@reddit

Don’t forget the army of low paid foreign workers who give the LLM a virtual “smack” for making up dumb answers just to get them to the state in which we experience them. LLMs are mostly smoke and mirrors. They do seem very impressive but if you pull back the curtain you can see them for what they are.

[-]

Classic-Bread-8248@reddit

I disagree. The holy trinity of survival, anywhere is shelter, water, food. In that order. Knowledge and acquired skills will help you get to this point.

Whilst AI can be useful, it only works whilst you have a connected interface. Imagine that you get washed ashore naked on some tropical island. AI won’t cut it at that moment in your life.

Or if you prefer: TEOTWAWKI happens on holiday away from all of your carefully selected AI purchases. What do you do?

I do agree that you could get some useful insight/data interpretation. The cynical part of me suspects that you will just spend more money

[-]

Dramatic-Zebra-7213@reddit

Download a free software (LM studio) then download a bunch of free models like Llama 3 8B, Mistral 7B and such onto it and run it on laptop. Result is a battery powered question answering machine at a cost of 0$ assuming you already own a pc.

[-]

treasonx@reddit

I run LLMs locally and they take a lot of resources and power :) Using Ollama from facebook is a decent alternative to GhatGPT but it isn't as powerful on it's own.

In my professional opinion being in software for over 30 years and experimenting with these tools, they are all mostly bullsh*t :)

I think they are fine to help supplement your work in your area of expertise. But they often make things up and can't be trusted. It's easy to tell when they are making things up if you are expert in that area.

I would never trust anything they say in an area I am not expert in. I have found they are too unreliable at this point. I hope they get better and I can command an army of AI agents. But I think that is pretty far off. I might be wrong but it feels like we're far from that point.

Now on the other hand they're awesome for comedy and entertainment! I guess if you have no one left to talk to you could always have a fun discussion with an LLM.

[-]

Dramatic-Zebra-7213@reddit

I have tested extensively a LLM named Aloe 8B alpha, which is a medical finetune of Llama 3. It diagnoses ailments pretty well, gives out solid empiric treatment recommendations, i have yet to find anything seriously wrong with its answers. It is a tool I really want to have at hand if something happens.

Would I trust it blindly, of course not. Of course i will validate its recommendations from my medical ebook collection. But it's a lot easiet to find answers in a book if you know what you are looking for.

LLM's are great for exactly that, pointing you into the right direction. It is a pretty daunting task for a layman to start diagnosing and finding treatment advice from a 1000 page medical manual.

And if you combine those pdf:s with AI using AnyhingLLM or similar RAG (retrieval augmented generation) software, you got yourself an absolute powerhouse of knowledge that rivals having a phone line to professional doctor...

[-]

goodnpc@reddit

They don't have to take much power. If you run it on a macbook, it consumes very little power. On any non-mac computer, it indeed takes a lot of power.

[-]

roundblackjoob@reddit

Change my mind

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[-]

Ddog78@reddit

Yeah. I'd rather download the whole of Wikipedia. It fits into a pendrive nowadays.

[-]

Dramatic-Zebra-7213@reddit

A decent AI fits on a pendrive too. It takes about 5 gigabytes (7 billion parameter model quantized to 5bits). And produces around 3-4 words per second on a average modern laptop.

[-]

roundblackjoob@reddit

Op has set up some local net and is a true "believer" I've seen it all before. People don't need more information, they need to get out and do some gardening, work on an engine, do some electronics.

[-]

Nobody_Else_@reddit

Relying on Ai for survival will get you killed.

https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foraging-mycological-society

[-]

orcishlifter@reddit

Please no one listen to this. A LLM has no concept of truth or pretty much anything but “what is most likely to be the next word”. Your local library is likely to survive most disasters, if you lack information I’d suggest that first.

[-]

k06a@reddit (OP)

I agree with you, LLMs could produce strange things, same way in internet you can find false claims. But usually doublechecking information by different angles helps to make sure instruction is correct or not. That’s what I meant with phrase “unreliable query language”.

[-]

Cute-Consequence-184@reddit

I'm from the pre Internet age and remember stuff just fine

[-]

ExcellentDecision721@reddit

An LLM, Chat GPT-level for instance, is still extremely beyond that in terms of computing power required to run locally.

LLMs do their thing by using brute-force computing - they have to know everything at once to generate an answer, not just the topic it's being queried with, which requires gargantuan amounts of RAM, for one thing.

I think there's apps that can download the entirety of Wikipedia to a phone, which is accessible to just about everyone.

Any essential survival info I'd probably want as hardcopies - so on paper.

[-]

drmike0099@reddit

You can run LLMs locally, they just aren't very fast. Meta's LLAMA 3 model is probably the best current LLM where you can do that. [I don't agree with OP, but it isn't an impossible idea.]

[-]

BooshCrafter@reddit

He posted this already. I already responded with a long list of things it got wrong that are alarming.

He's stubborn, didn't listen to the responses before, and won't listen now.

He's a loser developer who couldn't survive outside for 15 minutes.

[-]

deleted_by_reddit@reddit

[removed]

[-]

preppers-ModTeam@reddit

Your comment has been removed for breaking our rules on civility.

Name calling and inflammatory posts or comments with the intent of provoking users into fights will not be tolerated.

If the mod team feels that you are generally unhelpful and causing unnecessary confrontation, you will be banned. If you feel you are being trolled, report the comment and do not respond or you will be banned also.

[-]

https://new.reddit.com/r/preppers/wiki/index/

Please review the New Prepper's Resource Guide here:

https://new.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/toani0/new_preppers_resource_guide_answers_to_common/

If you are asking "Where do I start?" or "How do I get started?", please ask that question as a comment on that post and not as a standalone submission or post, otherwise your post may be removed.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.