YourGPT: in-house chatbot competitor announced

A US firm has announced one of the first open-source ChatGPT-like chatbots that companies can use in-house without giving away sensitive information or facing prohibitive upfront costs.

Databricks founder and chief executive Ali Ghodsi.

A US firm has announced one of the first publicly available, open-source ChatGPT-like chatbots that companies can use in-house without giving away sensitive information or facing prohibitive upfront costs and resources.

Databricks, a multibillion-dollar data storage and analytics company, will launch Dolly 2.0, a large language model artificial intelligence that it promises can be “finetuned” with proprietary business data, effectively creating a firm-specific, bespoke AI.

“This enables all these organisations around the world to use this to build their own bespoke models for their particular use cases to automate things and make things much, much more productive in the field they’re in,” Databricks chief executive Ali Ghodsi told The Australian. “With Dolly 2.0, any organisation can create, own, and customise a powerful LLM that understands how to talk to people.

“Dolly 2.0 is available for commercial applications without the need to pay for API access or share data with third parties.”

Dolly 2.0 is one the earliest movers in an industry set to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, Curtin University Data Science Innovation Hub director Alex Jenkins said.

Despite grim warnings that AI programs such as ChatGPT could replace white-collar office workers, many firms have put in place restrictions on its use due to data privacy concerns.

OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – states in its privacy policy it may collect information that users enter into its services.

Some well-resourced companies have already begun to retain technology firms to build these kinds of in-house, bespoke AI tools.

“I think that this kind of technology is very disruptive, particularly for a corporate search management tool,” Mr Jenkins said. “I fully expect we’ll see this disrupting search engine technology both on the web and inside corporate environments because you can put in proprietary and confidential data.”

“The utility of these kinds of products will be so high, they’ll be so useful that we’ll see massive uptake within organisations of this class of products.”

While Dolly 2.0 does not promise to be as advanced as the latest OpenAI products, it does open the door for companies to run AI on local or secure computers without fear of losing proprietary or confidential data.

Services like this have already been floated by Microsoft but are not publicly available.