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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

It depends. If they're using a small/medium local model as a 1:1 ChatGPT replacement as-is, they'll have a bad time. Even ChatGPT refers to external services to get more data.

But a local model + good harness with a robust toolset will work for people more often than not.

The model itself doesn't need to know who was the president of Zambia in 1968, because it has a tool it can use to check it from Wikipedia.

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You can install the complete text of Wikipedia locally too.

They've usually been intended for ereader/off-grid/post-zombie-apocalypse situations but I'd guess someone is working on an llm friendly way to install it already.

Be interesting to know the tradeoffs. The Tienammen square example suggests why you'd maybe want the knowledge facts to come from a separate source.

The Wikipedia folks are now working on implementing a language-independent representation for their encyclopedic content - one that's intended to be rigorously compositional and semantics-aware, loosely comparable to Universal Meaning Representation (UMR) as known in the linguistics domain, that - if successful - may end up interacting in very interesting ways with multi-language capable LLMs. Very early experiments (nowhere near as capable as UMR as of yet, but experimenting with the underlying software infrastructure) are at https://abstract.wikipedia.org , whilst a direct comparison of the projected design is given by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract_Wikipedia_N... https://elemwala.toolforge.org/static/nlgsig-nov2025.html

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