What began as a student project in 2023 will now serve a whole university community.
Illinois Chat, an official artificial intelligence (AI) software tool of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has launched for the Fall 2025 semester and is available for anyone on campus. In partnership with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Illinois Computes, NCSA developed Illinois Chat to offer large language model (LLM) abilities to the entire campus community.
This campus-developed tool allows users to create personalized LLM-based chatbots – similar to commercial options like ChatGPT – but with more control over their functions and content, meaning more security and less risk. By utilizing their own data focused on their intended audience, users can implement Illinois Chat to act as a 24/7 teaching assistant for professors, scrape campus websites to find needed resources or help organize research data.
And more.