I’m not talking about electricity or power. I mean, if you’re completely offline, how does AI still answer questions? Does it have some kind of built-in knowledge like a calculator? Or does it just know what it was trained on, so it can’t give answers outside of that? Like if I asked it about a game it never saw, it wouldn’t know?
AI doesn’t need the internet while running—it already has everything stored from training. That’s why some models are huge, because all the info is built into them.
Austin said:
AI doesn’t need the internet while running—it already has everything stored from training. That’s why some models are huge, because all the info is built into them.
Yeah, but it’s not just a giant list of facts. It doesn’t ‘remember’ things like a book—it generates answers based on patterns in what it learned.
@Blair
So basically… it works like humans did before the internet? How did someone in 1400s Europe know about Asia? People just shared info over time. And let’s be real, the internet is mostly nonsense anyway.
@Lyle
Yeah, and just like people, AI makes mistakes. It’s called ‘hallucinating’ but really, it’s just guessing based on patterns. Same as when people think they remember something but get it wrong.
It’s like running a game on your computer instead of streaming it. AI has all its knowledge up to when it was trained, but it can’t learn new things unless updated.
Think of AI like a giant brain. It learns from tons of text and finds patterns in how words are used together. It doesn’t store facts like a book, but instead remembers how words relate. If it read a lot about pickleball, it could probably describe the rules, but it’s not pulling up a document—it’s predicting the answer based on what it learned.
@Hartley
Some newer AI models even check their own answers before giving them, so they ‘think’ through it and correct mistakes. It’s basically like AI talking to itself first before replying. Works surprisingly well!
@Hartley
Thanks for this! I don’t totally get the math part, but I think I understand the general idea now.
This is something Google or an AI itself could answer for you.
You could just ask an AI… it would probably give you a better explanation than we can.
It works the same way you do. It has knowledge stored in its ‘memory’—or in AI’s case, its training data.
If you have a Pixel phone, it already has a small AI built in that doesn’t need internet. We’re going to see more of that soon—smart assistants that still work even if Wi-Fi is down. Pretty cool.
Where does it get the info? Same place you do—memory.
Depends on the AI. Some models, like LLaMA, are small enough to run on a personal computer with the right setup.
Yeah, it’s basically a very fancy calculator. You give it text, it runs math on it, and then it generates an answer. No magic involved, just numbers being crunched really fast.
Think of AI like a giant library with a built-in librarian. When you ask something, it finds the closest match in what it already ‘read’ during training. It doesn’t need internet because everything is already stored inside. Super simplified, but that’s the idea.