UC Irvine and UC San Diego launch customized AI tools
Generative artificial intelligence tools are promising tools in higher education for faculty, staff and students alike. But universities worry there are few safeguards for users’ data privacy and security in commercially available tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT .
That’s the impetus behind both UC Irvine and UC San Diego launching their own customized AI tools.
UC Irvine’s ZotGPT Chat launched for faculty and staff in January, and student access is coming soon, according to a release from the university. UC San Diego’s TritonGPT is planning a campuswide launch soon following two months of beta testing.
Tom Andriola, vice chancellor for data and information technology for UC Irvine, said that ZotGPT “can be leveraged for teaching, research and redesigning work processes and can serve as an engine for facilitating collaboration.”
Key items in UC Irvine’s ZotGPT Chat are internet-enabled responses, image generation, custom chatbots with department data and the ability to integrate the tool in faculty and staff software programs.
Just a handful of universities have launched their own in-house generative AI tools. UC San Diego is unique in that TritonGPT is hosted on local infrastructure at the San Diego Supercomputer Center instead of relying on a commercial platform, such as Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service.
UC San Diego’s CIO Vince Kellen told the publication Government Technology this means “the data is completely under our control, and it never leaves our network border to go externally.” However, he adds that this does require the university to manage their own hardware and capacity — something the university was able to do because of its long experience with AI. Kellen notes that’s not something that many colleges and universities have the skill capacity or budget for.
TritonGPT aims to be “a personal assistant who knows a lot about UC San Diego, such as answering questions about campus policies or where to hang out. It also can help its users write or polish emails, generate a presentation slide deck, make suggestions for workflow or write job descriptions. A new tool that helps fund managers with financial policies, payroll and financial transactions is in the works.