Ctrl+F only gets you so far. It doesn't allow you to perform semantic searches, for example. If you don't happen to know a unique word (or set of words) to search for, you're out of luck.
Just the other day, I was able to find a song by typing the phonetic pronunciation (well, as best I could) into ChatGPT, and it knew which song I was talking about right away. No way a regular search engine would've helped me there.
No. Your own data only gets you so far. And this is exactly the issue. No local model will make sense because the dataset its given is so small compared to what you are referring to - chatgpt.
I’ve been using 7b models to work with large text volumes (like entire books) with nothing short of phenomenal results. It has cut the time I need to accomplish many tasks by >90% and often offers insights I might easily have missed. My methodology requires a bit of time and compute to prepare a new subject matter expert system, but the results are absolutely worth it.
If you only need to query your own data, and can't upload that data to ChatGPT for compliance/security reasons, I think local LLMs are far from useless.
Just the other day, I was able to find a song by typing the phonetic pronunciation (well, as best I could) into ChatGPT, and it knew which song I was talking about right away. No way a regular search engine would've helped me there.