Small AI Models Gain Traction In places with unreliable networks

35 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by sscaryterry

8 Comments

tim-fan

an hour ago

Is anyone making LLM-in-a-box for emergency supply kits yet?

I feel that would be handy in all sorts of situations when networks are down.

Terr_

14 minutes ago

I imagine that for most "emergency" scenarios, it'll be a lot cheaper and more-robust to focus on dumber devices that store large amounts of normal reference material, as opposed to a system with the battery/CPU/memory/etc. to run an LLM.

If someone will need something like a medical flowchart for first-aid, it's probably better to generate it as an artifact in advance and then get it verified by an expert.

skybrian

5 minutes ago

You will probably want a search engine though. Perhaps a small LLM would work well as a component for that?

SwellJoe

27 minutes ago

This is couched in prepper nonsense, but it's got LLM, WikiPedia, maps, etc. A bunch of genuinely useful stuff to keep on a USB stick or whatever: https://www.projectnomad.us/

But, the current model you really want for an emergency kit is Gemma 4 12B QAT 4-bit. At ~7GB on disk, it's small enough to run on a tablet or any modern computer, slowly if you don't have a GPU or modern Apple silicon, but exceedingly smart for its size, excellent vision capabilities, good tool user, surprisingly good reasoning.

cdnsteve

an hour ago

Can you expand what you mean?

wahnfrieden

37 minutes ago

They want to ask the iOS Foundation model (frontier on device intelligence for something small) for instance about emergency procedures and life-saving info. I wouldn’t trust that model with much at all though. More likely to find what you need from miniature survival guides.

bombcar

2 hours ago

99% of the model "work" (meaning the connection to your computer) is just spinning a spinner - something that makes me want to wrap it with a mosh shell so I can just keep moving from network to network.

enoint

2 hours ago

Fascinating to wonder whether the bigger model finds fewer or more counterfeits than the on-device one.