Vanderbilt University Releases an Open Source Gen AI Platform for Institutions

IBL News | New York

Vanderbilt University made its Generative AI platform open source under the MIT license.

“We run what we believe is the most advanced enterprise, open-source Generative AI platform, competitive with or better than the top commercial offerings,” said Jules White, Senior Advisor to the Chancellor on Generative AI & Professor of Computer Science. “Assistants and agents are the future.”

The platform, named Amplify GenAI, is a model-independent solution that allows the building assistants to work with documents and PowerPoints, and access RAG. It runs privately in the institution’s AWS account.

The cost per user (tokens + AWS bill) for unlimited access to any model from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Mistral is ~$3/mo.

“It isn’t clear which model is best. We wanted to be model- and vendor-independent to always tap into the best-performing or most cost-effective models,” Jules White explained. “The competition between model vendors means that our costs have continued to fall while the reasoning capabilities of the models keep going up.”