Databricks develops open source ChatGPT alternative

Where OpenAI is slowly becoming less open, Databricks promises AI access to everyone.

OpenAI says goodbye to a dream

Some notorious Microsoft haters see Microsoft and founder Bill Gates as a kind of kryptonite that turns all good things into a kind of evil business model. These haters are gradually starting to include Elon Musk, who feels quite caught, now that the non-profit OpenAI to which he donated millions has been taken over by Gates and Altman. There is good news for these haters. Databricks is really going open source with AI.

Train your own AI on your PC with Databricks

Databricks, a San Francisco-based start-up with a market capitalization of nearly $38 billion, released programming code Friday, March 24 that, Databricks says, would allow a company to develop its own chatbot, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The code name for this is Dolly, after the first sheep born from a cloned cell. Databricks managed to train Dolly with ten thousand example sentences in just half an hour on a consumer PC.

The code is from an AI model, an algorithm that is trained on a collection of data and can learn from new data to perform various tasks. According to Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, the release is aimed at demonstrating that there is a viable alternative to OpenAI’s very expensive approach of training a large language model.

It is not yet known whether the chatbot will indeed come close to the performance of ChatGPT because no benchmark test has yet been performed, the company warns.

Large Language Model

An LLM, or Large Language Model, is the type of system behind ChatGPT. It consists of a huge collection of text, which has been converted into billions of data points in a neural network using heavy calculations. Also having answers given by an LLM takes a lot of computing power, which explains why ChatGPT is always down.

For example, GPT 3.5 and GPT-4 used a large part of the content of the Internet. The vision of DataBricks is that AI will eventually become open source, and that everyone will develop their own AI model and train it with their own data.

Curious? At the moment, according to SiliconAngle, Dolly is only available on special request to Databricks, via email address hello-dolly(at)databricks.com.