There are uses for AI in scientific and other things where using it for pattern matching to help find areas to focus on and then thoroughly doing the real work where accuracy is important are where the current AI really excels.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/05/24/ai-reveals-unsuspected-math-underlying-search-for-exoplanets/

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms trained on real astronomical observations now outperform astronomers in sifting through massive amounts of data to find new exploding stars, identify new types of galaxies and detect the mergers of massive stars, accelerating the rate of new discovery in the world’s oldest science.

It didn't just spit out answers they treated as correct, it did stuff they looked into and found ways to improve their methods. That is the real benefit of AI.

Gonna have to shill some FOSS LLMs here

You need an inference engine. Just use a llama.cpp derivate (fuck ollama, for a few reasons) and download an open model from HuggingFace (heavily recommend mistral series, which are Apache 2 license I think but I don't really remember)

You need to find a "quantization" of the model, you can find those from the model DNA on the right side of the screen in huggingface. You need a GGUF format to be exact.

Then all you need to do is tune some inference parameters and you're golden.