Transcription
The way things are going right now, let me ask you a question. If you lost the internet tomorrow, you know, not for an hour, but permanently, how are you going to look up medical information for grandma? How are you going to navigate without GPS? And how are you going to educate your kids? Most people don't have an answer for that, but now you do. This is Project Nomad. It's free, it's open source, and it's built right here at Cross Talk Solutions. Let's check it out.
All right. So, I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but whether it's a natural disaster, if it's a cyber attack on infrastructure, or if you're just living off-grid somewhere, the reality is that a lot of what we rely on today lives in the cloud. Medical information, AI, chatbots, how-to guides, maps, all of that requires an internet connection. And when that internet connection goes away, it all goes away.
Now, I wanted to find a way to save a copy of that information locally. And since we're all now used to AIs like ChatGPT, I also wanted it to have a local LLM. There are some products out there that have kind of tried to solve this. You've got Prepper Disk, you've got the Doombox, you've got Ready, but these are all basically just Raspberry Pis with Wikipedia and maybe some, you know, survival PDFs loaded onto them. And they're going to cost you anywhere from $150 to $700 bucks. In my opinion, you can do a lot better and you can do it for free. Well, other than the cost of the hardware, Project Nomad is an offline knowledge server that you can install onto any computer. Many PCs are excellent for this, but you can also just dig up an old laptop or desktop. Whatever you've got is perfectly fine as long as it can run Ubuntu.
But there is a huge caveat here in that your experience with a local AI chatbot is very much going to be dependent on having good hardware. You know, plenty of RAM as well as a decent GPU. But even without that, you still get a complete self-contained library of knowledge, offline maps, and educational tools, all accessible from any device on your network through a web browser.
Now, I do want to be clear about something right up front. This is a passion project of mine. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Project Nomad is 100% free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. You can go to GitHub right now and download it. We don't have paid tiers. We don't have subscriptions. We don't have accounts. There's no telemetry. All right? Nothing like that. This also isn't vibe-coded. All right? My developer and I have been working on Project Nomad for over a year now because I believe that everyone should have access to knowledge even without an internet connection. And I wanted something that actually runs serious AI models, not just a chatbot on a Raspberry Pi that takes, you know, 30 seconds to answer a simple question.
Project Nomad is designed for real hardware. If you throw a GPU at it, you're going to get GPU-accelerated AI inference. We're talking hundreds of tokens per second running models that can actually help you with complex questions. This is a home lab's dream project.
All right, so let me show you what it looks like. This is the command center. This is your home base. Every service that you've installed shows up here as a tile. You've got the information library, AI assistant, maps, education, notes, data tools. Click on any of these and they're going to open up that service. You've also got this little chat button down in the corner. That is your AI assistant. And it's always just one click away. You can even name it whatever you want. I called mine "Only Pawn in Game of Life."
When you first install Nomad, you get this easy setup wizard that walks you through everything step by step. You can pick the capabilities that you want like information library, education, AI assistant. Each one tells you what it includes and what it needs. And every one of these services is containerized for easy modular deployment. Then you pick out your content. Project Nomad has curated collections of information organized into different tiers. Essential, standard, and comprehensive. On the low side, essential is going to give you the basics without eating up your hard drive. And then comprehensive gives you absolutely everything. We've even got a nifty little storage bar up at the top that shows you exactly how much disk space you're going to need before you commit to anything. Once you select what you want, the progress bars show you all of your downloads in progress. And these happen in the background. A full copy of Wikipedia with pictures is almost 100 gigs, so it's going to take a while.
All right, so this here is the information library. This is powered by Kwix. You've got full Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg with thousands of books. You got medical references, developer documentation, as well as survival guides. The content explorer lets you browse available information, and then download what you want. You can also go into the content manager to see what's installed as well as manage your library. All of the information is organized into categories like medicine, education, survival, computing, and reference. You pick a category. You pick a tier that you want. How much data do you want from that category? And then it downloads straight to your Nomad server.
Then we have our AI assistant. The AI assistant is a full chat interface running on your hardware. You can then pick out and download different AI models. Anything from small, fast models up to 70 billion parameter models if your hardware can handle it. You can even download uncensored models if that's your kind of thing. My server right here is a Minis Forum MSO2 Ultra with a GeForce RTX 5060 and it can run models up to about 30 billion parameters, though it does get pretty sluggish at that size. But models in the 7 to 10 billion parameter range run almost as fast on this server as using ChatGPT.
Okay, but also check this out. This is really cool. See this knowledge base button? You can upload your own documents, right? PDFs, text files, whatever you want. And the AI indexes those uploads and now you can ask it questions based on your own content. So, let's say you've got a stack of proprietary repair manuals or a medical field guide or, you know, your homestead documentation. You upload your documentation here and now you can ask the AI questions specific to your documents. It'll cite the source and it'll tell you exactly where it found the answer. This is known as RAG or retrieval augmented generation. It's basically like your own little local notebook LLM.
We've also got offline maps. You pick out the regions that you want to download and you get full OpenStreetMap data. This all works with no internet, no cell service, nothing. Right? If you're off-grid or in an emergency situation, you've now got detailed maps of your area on your local network.
The education platform is powered by Calibri. This gives you full Khan Academy courses, educational videos, interactive lessons. It's a complete K through 12 curriculum available offline. So, if you're homeschooling or if you live in a community that doesn't have reliable internet, this gives your kids access to world-class educational content with no internet required.
And because we're tech people and we can't help ourselves, I also built in a full-on benchmarking tool. So, the benchmarking tool is going to test your CPU, the memory, the disk, as well as AI performance, and it's going to come up with your Nomad score. You can then share your Nomad score to the community leaderboard and see how your build stacks up against everyone else. Now, I'm currently top of the leaderboard with a Nomad score of 90.2, but if you think you can do better, give it a shot. And you can always check the current leaderboards at benchmark.pronomad.us.
We've also built in some extra tools like Cybershe and Flatnotes. And we've got a ton of ideas for expanding Project Nomad's functionality in the future. And all of this, every single thing that I just showed you runs in Docker containers, which means you get clean upgrades and easy rollbacks. I really wanted to build this to be a professional containerized deployment, just like a piece of enterprise software.
All right, so what do you need to get started? The first thing you're going to need is a Linux computer, right? Ubuntu or Debian. This could be a mini PC. It can be an old desktop. It can be a, you know, an Intel Nook, right? Whatever. If you want decent AI performance though, you're also going to want a GPU. Now, I recommend an Nvidia RTX 3060 or better for decent performance on the AI models. But don't let that scare you away, right? All of this will run without a GPU. It's just going to be a little bit slower on the AI side.
The install is just one command. You download the install script, you run it, and it sets everything up. Docker, the database, the web interface, absolutely everything. From there, you just open up a browser. You go to the IP address or hostname of your Nomad box that's running on port 8080. And then the easy setup wizard walks you through the rest. You pick out your content, you download it, and you're off and running. The whole setup takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes, plus however long your content takes to download. If you've already got spare hardware sitting around, you can run Project Nomad right now. You do not need to buy anything.
So, what's next for Project Nomad? We have some really cool things on the roadmap. Our family food planner is a separate project that lets you plan out weeks of food storage based on your family size and your budget. And that's eventually going to integrate right into Nomad. We've also got more curated content collections coming such as entertainment. And we're also trying to grow our Nomad community. So, if you want to stay in the loop, if you want to check out the details, head over to projectnomad.us. You can sign up for email updates. Now, I am not advertising to you. This is just for release announcements as well as new content. And if you want to get involved, the GitHub repo is fully open. You can file issues, you can suggest features, you can contribute code. Any contribution is welcome. And if you want to hang out with other Nomad builders, we've got a Project Nomad channel in the Cross Talk Discord. The link is in the description. So, come share your build. I want to see your Nomad score. I want to hear about your use cases and I really want to see what people do with this project.
So that's Project Nomad. It's a free open-source offline knowledge server with local AI. It's everything those $700 survival Raspberry Pis can do except it's completely free. Links to everything down in the description and we will see you in the next video. Well, assuming that the internet still exists.