Ask HN: Are open-weight LLMs the new offline encyclopedias?

There was a time when offline encyclopedias were used heavily as internet was not widely available. I used to install britannica encyclopedia and Microsoft Encarta on my PCs (I had no internet at home at that time) and it had helped me a lot between the years 1999 to 2006.

Now we have open-weight LLMs. There are very good models of size < 15GB.

So I’m wondering:

- Are open-weight LLMs effectively becoming the next evolution of offline encyclopedias?

- If so, what replaces the idea of “citation” and “verifiability” in this paradigm, as they do hallucinate time to time ?

Curious how others here are thinking about this shift, especially folks building offline first educational systems.