Campus-GPT: How 2 University of California Campuses Are Designing Their Own Specialized AI Tools

University of California, San Diego (UCSD) student Matthew Holland went from fixing tech issues at the information technology (IT) desk to helping build one of the first custom generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms at a university.

After AI started gaining traction in January 2023, Holland began questioning how universities could utilize the technology.

He found an open-source project called Danswer, founded by two UCSD alumni, that could connect company tools and documents to any large language model, such as ChatGPT, and thought the university could use the technology to create a custom tool.

He brought the idea to a group — composed of service desk student employees and full-time Information Technology Services (ITS) employees — that had been exploring how to adapt the new technology on campus.

Brett Pollak, senior director of workplace technology services, was interested. Pollak was a key creator in developing the university’s specialized AI assistant, TritonGPT.

He placed Holland on the ITS application development team and invited him to work on the AI.

TritonGPT began its phased rollout to select campus employees in March 2024, following a two-month early user program. Holland, now a fourth-year data science major, works as a student engineer on TritonGPT, alongside other student developers.

“I think it’s pretty rewarding to be able to apply what I’ve learned in all my classes and my interest in a real-world service and kind of provide value to the university,” Holland told BestColleges.

UCSD is one of only a few universities in the country that have engineered customized generative AI tools. Since November 2022, institutions like the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Washington University, and the University of California, Irvine have designed campus-specific versions of ChatGPT.

For universities, these AI tools are a way to experiment with generative AI without the privacy and security risks that come with using public AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

For faculty and students, it puts the myriad of information on university websites and documents in one streamlined tool.

TritonGPT is not just an AI chatbot, but rather a platform that hosts several AI assistants — including a university-specific assistant trained on the school’s array of websites. It also has a helper that creates job descriptions.

TritonGPT is trained on over 20 of the university’s various websites and documentation, including the admissions website, course catalog, University of California and UCSD policy documents, and the university-run news site UC San Diego Today.

“Because it’s trained on data from university websites, this tool enables tasks such as drafting emails to prospective students that showcase the unique features of UCSD or addressing more complex inquiries like identifying strategies and resources for career advancement at the university,” Pollak told BestColleges.

Currently, the university is in the process of developing a fund manager coach that will provide personalized advice for those who oversee grants and manage departmental finances.

While a handful of universities have engineered similar tools to TritonGPT, UCSD’s method stands out: TritonGPT is entirely hosted on school premises, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, allowing the institution full control over its data usage and sharing.

“This approach, which leverages a unique and internationally renowned campus asset, not only is more cost-effective but also is more private and secure since we’re not sending the data to another location or third party,” Pollak said.

TritonGPT uses Meta’s LLama 2 open-source language model, along with additional frameworks, including Danswer, which allows schools to incorporate campus-specific content into its AI tools, from questions about university policies and processes to what campus restaurants are serving that day.

“This approach offers significant security advantages by ensuring our data remains under our control, while also enabling the incorporation of additional frameworks to tailor the user experience beyond the [large language model] alone,” Pollak said.

In January, UC Irvine launched its AI chatbot, ZotGPT Chat, for faculty and staff.

Similar to the University of Michigan and Harvard University, ZotGPT is built off Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which provides access to large language models, fine-tuned with additional privacy and personalization tools for universities to customize their exclusive platform.

“Azure OpenAI Service empowers universities to harness the capabilities of generative AI for their unique needs while benefiting from built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security,” ​​Lydia Smyers, vice president of U.S. Education for Microsoft, said in a statement to BestColleges.

One of the biggest challenges when exploring bringing an AI service such as Azure OpenAI to campus is the security and privacy of the data input to the system, Mark Warschauer, chair of the advisory committee on generative AI and education at UC Irvine, told BestColleges.

“Security is an important concern, and I think that that’s one of the major rationales behind creating ZotGPT because the data is not retained by an outside provider,” he said.

Smyers explained that university-specialized Azure OpenAI models are available exclusively for each campus. The data is not available to OpenAI or any other customer, nor is it used to improve other models or third-party products or services.

Azure OpenAI also features a content filtering system, running both prompts and answers through classification models “aimed at detecting and preventing the output of harmful content.”

Currently, ZotGPT offers users a mobile phone experience and voice chat. Down the line, the university hopes to integrate:

Warschauer said he uses ZotGPT primarily for his writing and research purposes, having the technology proofread his work, suggest alternative words or phrasing, generate titles, and summarize longer passages.

Students used ZotGPT in art courses to critique the technology’s biases, while computer science and programming instructors have used platforms including ZotGPT and ChatGPT to have students check, analyze, and build code.

This winter, engineering students will use a UC Irvine-developed platform called PapyrusAI in a writing course.

UC Irvine expects to offer full student access to ZotGPT by the end of the year.

“One important rationale for using these tools for instruction is developing the AI literacy of our students, helping them understand how AI works, [and] helping them understand both its strengths and its limitations. By bringing AI-created documents into the classroom, students can look at them and critique them,” Warschauer said.

Along with UCSD and UC Irvine, the UC San Francisco (UCSF) has given students access to a UCSF IT-supported artificial intelligence ecosystem that connects AI tools with UCSF data and systems.

Pollak says UCSD is in “active discussions” with other UC locations and other higher education institutions about the possibility of replicating TritonGPT for their specific campus and running the service on their behalf.

For Holland, TritonGPT offers a new tool for students to better navigate the university. He hopes that in the future they will be able to build even more student-specific features.

“Right now, the biggest value proposition is that you’re able to search data across multiple UCSD sources and get an answer in one place,” he said. “With such a large university like UCSD, I think one of the challenges as a student is navigating all these different places where information can be. And I think TritionGPT can solve that.”