> LLM-in-a-box for emergency

For most actual emergency scenarios, a device that focuses on storage of large amounts of prepared normal reference material [0] will be wayyyyy cheaper, durable, portable, and able to run without being plugged into an untouched power-plant.

In contrast, imagine building a beefy computer with good GPU/RAM, ruggedizing it, and then mothballing it in a "safe" location for the big earthquake/flood/etc. Then when you need it, how will you power it? If power is 20 miles away on the other side of the mountain, are you going to carry it on your back, or are you going to carry water to live?

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.

I've been mulling over a good use of a large philanthropy spend in the next decade, and I would love to build a bunch of hardware "oracles" that include an LLM. Ideally solid state, visual/audio, solar + usb-c, so, good in a lot of doomsday scenarios as well as just out hiking. It's a fun thought experiment. I imagine making like 1 million of them, they could be sold and genuinely useful, but also given away; once owned, you could use them, or store and put in an emergency box, bury next to the 10k year clock.. a lot of possibilities.

Can you expand what you mean?