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Vicuna, a new open-source chatbot developed by a community of researchers at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi, and four other global universities, has become a trendsetter, Eric Xing,
MBZUAI President and University Professor, told the Emirates News Agency (WAM). “Vicuna has emerged as a trendsetter due to its high quality and reasonable cost, making it suitable for use across all industries and sectors,” he said.
In an exclusive interview with WAM at the MBZUAI, Xing explained that Vicuna was developed by MBZUAI, the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley); Carnegie Mellon University (CMU); Stanford; and the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego). Quarter million immediate users Vicuna gained a quarter million users within the first two weeks of its introduction in April and now stands at more than three million, Xing revealed. “It has received around 90% positive feedback in terms of subjective quality responses, making it the most well-known, publicly available chatbot alternative.”
Compared to other large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 which powers the ChatGPT chatbot or Google’s LaMDA which powers Bard, Vicuna is far less energy intensive and therefore far less expensive to train and run, he pointed out. Low Cost, Low Footprint Vicuna costs $300 to create and has a significantly smaller carbon footprint compared to GPT-3, which is estimated to have cost more than $4 million to train and according to Stanford University’s 2023 AI Index Report, emitted more than 500 tonnes of carbon, the MBZUAI president explained.
Customers can train a chatbot for a particular purpose, sector, or industry by feeding in a large dataset of relevant data.
The chatbot, once trained on this data, generates appropriate responses to user queries. Apt For Research However, Xing made it clear that, at the moment the chatbot is used for research only. “As an open-source chatbot, Vicuna has not been commercialised and is only available for the purposes of research.”
An open-source chatbot refers to freely downloadable and usable chatbot software without any licensing fees. It allows anyone to access and modify the source code, enabling developers and users to contribute to its development. Open-source chatbots are typically more flexible and customisable compared to proprietary alternatives. Sophisticated, AccurateThe MBZUAI president described the chatbot as a more sophisticated and accurate model.
“Vicuna is a manageable-sized model with 13 billion parameters that can fit on a single GPU, which will give better outcomes.” “Thirteen billion parameters” refers to the number of adjustable values within the language model used to train the chatbot. A higher parameter count generally indicates a more sophisticated and accurate model capable of better understanding and responding to human language. Conversational ChatbotExplaining the “conversational” feature of the chatbot, the official said,
“Vicuna is built upon an existing foundational model named LLaMA, which is a pre-trained language model developed by Meta AI. Additional user conversation data from various sectors have been incorporated to fine-tune it into a conversational chatbot.” Xing said Vicuna has been introduced at an appropriate time.
“The timing of Vicuna’s introduction is very good due to the public demand for low-cost, easily accessible, privacy-protected chatbots that offer personalised and customisable solutions. This is why Vicuna gained significant attention within a short period, attracting a quarter million users in just two weeks.” An open-source chatbot refers to freely downloadable and usable chatbot software without any licensing fees. It allows anyone to access and modify the source code Vicuna has a significantly smaller carbon footprint compared to GPT3.
