For years there are people preparing for a nuclear war, for the end of the world, or For both. They are called ‘Preppers‘, that at times like the recent Spanish blackout They feel claimed. The movement is mutatingand as Mit Technology Review collects, the needs and possibilities of 2025 leave us people doing and proposing Collect Artificial Intelligence Language Models (AI) to save them in a USB pendrive.
A good tool for the end of the world. The engineer Simon Willison, known for being the creator of the Django web development framework, has A plan For a future dystopian: keeping open artificial intelligence models, you can execute them at home if collapse civilization. In this way, even without internet access, it would be possible to continue accessing the enormous human knowledge located in its pesos.
To carry out something like that, there is no need for resources beyond the reach of the homes of the homes. Today, there are already AI models that can be executed at home, Even in smartphones. Even something as powerful as Deepseek can work on our PCprovided we use a small version, the ‘distillate’ of 8,000 million parameters.
As Share Evan Hahnthe Chinese Qwen 3 model, in its 600,000 parameters version, can occupy the ridiculous amount of 523 MB in our storage. With only 2 GB, we can download call 3.2 in its version of 3,000 million parameters.
A powerful but “economical” team like a Mac Mini M4 can run models capable at home.
An alternative to something more traditional: all Wikipedia. Download all the wikipedia To read it without connection, it is something possible with different options, and something equally useful in an apocalyptic scenario such as the proposal. Hahn has included what he would occupy with the great open language models, and using little space, enough information can be stored.
With 356.9 MB we can access the 50,000 best articles in Wikipedia. And with 57.18 GB, which fit perfectly in a modern pendrive, we can have in our possession all the Wikipedia available in any language. Occupy less than half of the space, we can have QWEN 3 of 32,000 million parameters and Deepseek R1 of the same size.
Limitations. Using artificial intelligence at home to have access to the knowledge of the world sounds very good, until not so much. Simon Willison himself told Mit Technology Review to use the local AI models “is like having a strange, condensed and defective version of Wikipedia.” The reason is simple: the models are trained with data available on the Internet, to the point that the AI bots are putting the future of Wikipedia at riskHowever, these models do not faithfully reproduce all the information when we enter Prompts o Indications to ask about a specific topic.
The hallucinations problem. Not only are they confirmed by actors such as OpenAi, but for them we know that models such as O3 and O4-mini They hallucinate more than their predecessors.
According to Jensen Huang, we need much more powerful hardware So that this phenomenon of AI disappears, and of course, it is not hardware that we have at home. In addition, small models executable at home, being very small versions in size and memory used, toThey look more.
And more limitations. In our tests executing local AI models on smartphones, The results are irregularalthough promising. In that sense, Apple itself will open in iOS 26 his AI to any developerso that they can execute it on the device itself. Beyond the quality of small and local models against the gigantic Grok 4, O3-PRO either Claude 4 a ‘prepper’ plan with pendrive has more limitations, and is to trust such a unit for a situation that requires, above all, reliability.
These USB units are not designed to last more than 10 years. If they have poor quality NAND chips, they can even stop working without use. And that is why there are companies like Machdyne UG, which has created a pendrive that It lasts 200 yearsor so they promise. Of course, even if I achieve that longevity, it has an 8 kB capacity, which only gives to save some text. If you want to store almost all the knowledge of humanity, it is best to think of a lasting environment in optimal conditions. And then, think about major disasters.
Image | Antonio Sabán with Ia
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