Shownotes
Survival LLM is a free, open-source app for Mac and Windows that answers emergency questions with a local AI model and a local reference library. No internet, no account, no tracking: set it up once while you are online, and after that it works with the internet off.
What's covered:
- The offline library: about 930,000 Wikipedia articles, WikiMed, MedlinePlus, WikEM, Ready.gov (FEMA) guides, CDC travelers' health, US military medicine and survival manuals, wikiHow, iFixit, Appropedia and Stack Exchange
- Every answer lists its sources, with the passage highlighted
- Which model your computer gets, by memory: NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super, Qwen3.8 27B, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning or IBM Granite 4.2 8B
- Setup in three steps, download sizes, and how many questions a laptop battery lasts
- Adding your own files: PDFs, Word documents, ebooks, notes
Project page: brangus.io/survival-llm
License: MIT. The library sources keep their own licenses, some are non-commercial only.
The "21 of 22" scores are the project's own numbers: 22 blackout and first-aid questions, graded blind, on an earlier build of the library. AI models make mistakes, the small ones more often, so always read the sources it cites.
Chapters
- 0:00 What it is
- 0:26 What it knows
- 0:55 Sources you can check
- 1:09 Model selection
- 1:52 Setup
- 2:18 Library size
- 2:38 Power and speed
- 2:54 Your own files
- 3:08 The honest take