Survival LLM is a free app that answers blackout, first-aid and water questions on your own computer, with no internet after setup.
A free app called Survival LLM puts an AI assistant and an emergency library on your own computer. Ask how to keep food safe in a blackout, treat a burn or purify water, and it answers with no internet. It drew 159 points and 94 comments on Hacker News, a popular tech discussion site.
The app is free and open source, meaning its code is public. You set it up once while online. After that, the AI model and the library both live on your machine. The makers say nothing you ask leaves it, and there is no account and no tracking.
Every answer lists the articles it used. Click one to read it yourself, with the exact passage highlighted. That matters because AI can be wrong.
You can also add your own PDFs, Word documents, ebooks and notes, such as a generator manual or a family emergency plan. The AI searches them too, and they stay on your computer. Each source keeps its own license, and some are for non-commercial use only.
The app works on Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or newer) with macOS 14 Sonoma or newer, and on 64-bit Windows 10 or 11. When it opens, it checks your computer's memory and downloads the AI model that fits. More memory means a smarter model.
The full library is a 9 GB download and takes 19 GB once installed. A smaller version without Wikipedia and iFixit is 1.3 GB, or 3 GB installed. Free space needed is the model's size plus 5 GB, plus about 27 GB while the full library installs (10 GB for the smaller one).
Setup takes 20 minutes to about 2½ hours, depending on your computer and internet speed. Only about 5 minutes of that is clicking. The rest is downloading.
The makers tested an earlier build on 22 blackout and first-aid questions, graded blind. They counted an answer as right if it got the main point of official guidance right. Smaller models make more mistakes, so the app always shows its sources for you to check. Treat it as a fast way to find the official text, not a replacement for a doctor or emergency services.
On a MacBook Pro, the makers measured about 100 W while it answers, for 5 to 40 seconds per question. A full battery answers roughly 100 to 300 questions. A small generator or power station runs it easily.
The key is timing. Download it while the internet works, check that you have the disk space, and try a few questions before you ever need it. Updates install in one click and keep your models, library and files.
Set up Survival LLM before an outage, then check the sources it shows, because small AI models can still get answers wrong.
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