can anyone do research?

yeah, you’re literally living in the age with best access to information EVER. go download some textbooks and do your own PhD in the evenings after work.

there’s like a hand full of free LLM models, just ask them what you are curious about and tell them to suggest books and build a syllabus for you.

also arXiv Xplorer and ChatPDF are two tools that I find very helpful.

I also use local instances of gpt-oss, Deepseek and Llama on LM Studio for when I want to ask spicy stuff that I want to keep private. Plus you can edit the model responses and kinda hack around content filters hehe