No. Honestly, it is not. There is a lot of misinformation floating around right now. It is because of a campaign from proprietary AI to create monopoly in this space. Open Source offline AI is killing the proprietary model. This is like the early days of the internet when companies tried to monopolize the infrastructure and failed. AI is not the product of the next digital economy, it is the underlying framework. It isn’t anything like what the media portrays. Most people talking about this either have an agenda or they are hot take headlines readers.

(What’s my agenda) -Self education. I am disabled in a way that makes it hard to hold posture. I want to learn computer science, but have gotten stuck in the curriculum many times. As soon as I heard about offline AI that could reference a private database I knew I had to try this. I have no other connections to this space. This tech is extremely powerful in its potential, but it is also an extremely advanced tool. These types of statements are extremely misunderstood by most people that have not taken the time to really understand the technology. This tech is the ability to ask a book questions in plain text. It is the ability to search for information about products without a search engine biased on ads revenue. It is a way to ask highly technical questions and get direct answers. It is a way to use a basic understanding of code and generate snippets an order of magnitude faster than looking up the same info on stack overflow. It is a plain text way to generate Linux commands or to navigate and explain an API. This is also a tool to help with deep personal social, taboo, or difficult issues to talk about with real people. It is a tool to help a person grow by giving them someone to talk to that can understand boring or niche subjects we want to talk about as we learn but have no outlets from deep in our rabbit hole.

This is limited, you must be skeptical of all outputs, and second source everything important. It takes a very large model to generate mostly accurate results. This is everything embedded in language. The massive models are usually trained on multiple languages. This accesses embedded elements and perspectives inherent to other languages that most of us will never have access to.

If you are aware of both the enormous scope of information embedded in your own awareness, and aware of the limitations of your memory when it comes to accuracy of very specific details, this is exactly what any of these LLMs are capable of doing except it has been collectivised and made accessible.

Models themselves have no persistent memory. What does this mean? If you type in questions, it can recall those questions and answers for a time during the session. (Wait, you just said it has no memory!) This functionality is not part of the LLM. This is code that processes the text prompt and a bunch of static instructions needed to tell the model exactly what to do. Keeping the conversion history available is all done in this external layer. The model itself is a freaking internet troll. It is a psychopath reddit user replying unless you tell it exactly what it is and how it should respond, and it will take everything possible out of your intended context. It is really hard to limit this part of the prompt well. It is probably impossible to make a true generalist, but I digress. My point is that, the amount of data that can be entered into a prompt is limited. The history must be managed and there will be terms dropped from the history unless you are trying to collect all of this data for monetization and you are willing to build a giant amount of infrastructure to collect and process this data. The thing is, as far as the model is concerned, all of this data is in a single prompt every single time it is processed. This data can never be added to the model in real time or effectively in post processing. The model can’t interact with this information internationally in a way that alters what it does on the next iteration. The networks inside the model are static. It is not magic. It is complicated, it is tensor math and vectors, and statistics, but all of this is applied to: “Question = (X) category/Prompt text results in (X) as the most probable best next word.” That’s it. That is all that is happening under the hood. The reason this is “new” tech has to do with how the problem of categorizing information is handled quickly in a vector cloud. The model data is just like a better search engine that is able to find everything we’ve ever talked about on the internet.

If you understand this, you should clearly see why this must be transparent, offline, and open source. You should also see why absolute control over this would make extremely concentrated power that no corporation or government should have control over. These are the real issues. Put all of the information you have encountered into this context and ask yourself who has what agenda in the information you have encountered.

If you want a credible source, watch this: https://piped.video/watch?v=OgWaowYiBPM

Or look into Yann LeCun. I hate Meta more than most, but this guy is not the usual from the company. He has the freedom to speak his mind, is the chief architect behind the open source AI movement, and is a former Bell Labs guy. If you know anything about the people, products, and legacy of Bell Labs, you should know that most of our digital age came from these people in this space. This is the future being created right now.