The internet can die. This free AI will still answer you

If the internet goes down tomorrow, most chatbots turn into a useless icon. Survival LLM is built the other way round: a free, open source app that puts a local AI model and a big reference library on your computer, and then works with no network at all.

The library holds about 1.5 million articles: roughly 930,000 of Wikipedia's most read pages, the WikiMed and MedlinePlus medical references, FEMA and CDC guides, US military survival and first aid manuals, wikiHow and iFixit repair guides. A lighter edition has about 500,000 articles and skips Wikipedia and iFixit. Ask how long fridge food lasts in a blackout or how to treat a burn, and the model searches that library and shows the exact article and passage it used.

You can add your own files too, like a generator manual, a medicines list or a family emergency plan as PDF, Word or EPUB. Everything stays on the computer, and questions never leave it.

The model depends on your memory. On a Mac with 128 GB it uses NVIDIA Nemotron, which got 21 of 22 blackout and first aid questions right in the authors' own test. On a regular 16 GB machine it falls back to IBM's 8 billion parameter Granite, which scored 14 of 22, so the source under every answer is not decoration, it is the point. It runs on Apple Silicon Macs and 64 bit Windows 10 and 11. The full library is about a 9 GB download and has to be installed in advance, while you still have a connection. The project hit the Hacker News front page the day before.

Odd feeling: the most useful AI of the week is the one you need on the day everything else breaks.