With all due respect: why does this need an LLM, and this much data? Surely a "classic" knowledge base with a more traditional search bar, running on top of the same data this LLM was trained on would be way smaller, and actually as trustworthy as the source material it surfaces for you?
There are a fair number of people who seem to believe that LLMs contain "world knowledge" and are blissfully unaware of how inaccurate an ungrounded chatbot can be. They ask it questions, it gives them confident and plausible (sometimes even correct!) answers, and they leap to the conclusion that these are useful tools for end-of-civilization knowledge bases. I fought this battle countless times on HN and Reddit, generally unsuccessfully.
This project at least attempts to ground its answers with (presumably) human-vetted sources. That will make it much, MUCH more accurate and truthful than a bare model. But there is still a non-zero chance for it to hallucinate answers, especially when posed a question that it doesn't have any source material in its database.
As for why bother hooking up an LLM instead of a simple search engine, search engines don't synthesize data from multiple sources into a coherent answer for you, but LLMs are (mostly) great at that.
That said, while I like this pattern (LLM + knowledge base) for lots of things, this isn't necessarily something I'd trust with my own (or my family's) survival.
Yeah, without the ability to search the web, a very small model is going to be too dumb to be useful, and maybe even dangerous due to hallucinations. But, there is a point where the knowledge of self-hostable models will surprise you. That point is probably not runnable on the average laptop, though. It's maybe in the ~30B range, but more realistically in the 128B MoE range. I guess in their tests Qwen 3.8 27B got as many right as the much larger Nemotron Super, but I'd bet Qwen 3.8 Flash would be better than either, but it needs 128GB of unified RAM or a big GPU and lots of system RAM to run the 4-bit version.
I think if I had to build an emergency LLM today, that had to run on modest hardware, I'd bet on Gemma 4 12B. It's got excellent reasoning and good vision/audio and speaks 140 languages.
But, I don't know about the "classic" knowledge base theory, though. Is there a high quality curated pile of survival information that could be bundled into a web UI and made searchable in a knowledge base? The LLMs aren't focused on that topic, so there's a lot of wasted space, but they know a little about a lot of things, including survival topics. Combined with Wikipedia, and maybe a few other sources, you're probably better off with one than without.
I guess one could use some huge models plus web search to compile/distill a focused survival knowledge base or LLM.
Edit: Project NOMAD seems to mostly be exactly that. It has authoritative sources in a searchable knowledge base and the tiny LLMs are an afterthought, which is probably what they should be. https://www.projectnomad.us/
The LLM weights are not tuned for truth, including citing sources, it's tuned for "doing as much as possible, as fast as possible, on your own". If you ask it for a source, it literally has to autocomplete one, it's not going to figure out which source is the most appropriate or authoritative as part of that text generation pass.
Because you forgot to look at how many westerners move to other countries, too, and how many people in those countries move to western countries. You're asking a question based on an assumption that doesn't hold.
Ok I know a ton of people move to the west and so many move to other countries within the west as well. I moved to America too but I never got why people here talk so much about Japan. Like I have white/American friends who plan yearly or bi-yearly trips, learn the language, etc
I have nothing against the country or anything I’m just curious why Japan is so popular. Was it historical or something?
It was the most developed Asian country for a long period; so naturally it attracted the most attention from the west, as it was seen as a peer. Especially as it's allied to the US and is a liberal democracy, unlike e.g. China.
Pardon? You mean the traditional Belgian, Dutch, French, and German cookie? Because it's a cross-border (food) cultural good, it's not something invented by, or to this day cherished in, one specific country.
Oh no question, biscoff is yours, I will give you that any day of the week (and then ask if I could have one, of course). Even speculoos is pretty much Belgian. But speculaas... come on author, you clearly did _some_ research, why get this wrong?
The nomenclature is quite loose. Speculaas and speculoos will be used interchangeably in parts of Belgium. "Spéculoos" will refer to both in the french-speaking part, while I anecdotally noticed Flemish people will use "speculaas" even for biscoffs.
That's why I only eat kruidnoten, less of a linguistic quagmire.
Anything that's tied to hardware is one accident away from locking you out forever unless you set of "2 of 3" or some other "let's make life even worse when it comes to authentication" solution.
Someone never learned the "you don't fund this year's conference using this year's signups and sponsorships, you fund NEXT year's conference using this year's signups and sponsorships" rule that applies once your conference is an established yearly event. How the hell was there no contingency fund?
If I am an expert at using a hammer, no matter which hammer I buy, I know what the result of swinging it will be. If I am an expert at using an LLM, I have no idea what the actual result is going to be, and that's before considering a model update. Unlike being an expert at a tool like photoshop, where even 10 years of updates still lets me go "I know what is going to happen if I crop this image".
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