Last fall, after playing around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating AI model — the predecessor to GPT-4 — former Uber research scientist Jerry Liu discovered what he describes as “limitations” around the model’s ability to work with private data (e.g., personal files). To solve for this, he launched an open source project, LlamaIndex, designed to unlock the capabilities and use cases of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4.
“LLMs offer incredible capabilities for knowledge extraction and reasoning — they can perform question-answering, summarization and insight extraction and even sequential decision making with an external environment,” Liu told TechCrunch in an email interview. “But LLMs have limits.”
As the project grew in popularity (to the tune of 200,000 monthly downloads), Liu joined forces with Simon Suo, one of his old colleagues at Uber, to turn LlamaIndex into a fully fledged company. Today, LlamaIndex (the company) offers a framework to assist developers in
