Databricks open-sources its Dolly large language AI model

In an attempt to open up its technology to a wider audience, enterprise software company Databricks has released Dolly, a large language model and its associated training code under an open-source licence. Despite being based on a much smaller underlying model, the company says it has ChatGPT-like functionality and can be run "in-house". The move was inspired by the success of OpenAI's natural language platform ChatGPT, which became one of the fastest-growing consumer apps within a couple of months of its release in November last year. It has since caused some of the world's largest companies including Microsoft and Google to pivot and release generative and natural language AI tools. "We show that anyone can take a dated off-the-shelf open source LLM and give it magical ChatGPT-like instruction-following ability by training it in 30 minutes on one machine, using high-quality training data," Databricks wrote in a blog post explaining the decision.