That's not what I meant though, I said that it speeds up the process of looking it up. It's about as good as an unreliable peer that tells you what it thinks is happening. I can then research it myself based on the keywords that it mentions.

It is similar to a web search, but with how bad search results are these days (a large part because of other people making LLM generated garbage articles), I find that asking a locally hosted LLM will give me a better starting point. Since it's running on my own simple hardware, I'm not as worried about the resource cost compared to the tech companies' ones.

I agree with everything else you've said though