AI-VERDE: A Gateway for Egalitarian Access to Large Language Model-Based Resources For Educational Institutions
This addresses the challenge for educational institutions needing cost-effective and manageable LLM access for teaching and research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM and platform technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of unequal access to large language models (LLMs) in academic settings by introducing AI-VERDE, a unified platform that streamlines integration and management of commercial and open LLMs, resulting in significant engagement across diverse educational and research groups in a pilot deployment at a large public university.
We present AI-VERDE, a unified LLM-as-a-platform service designed to facilitate seamless integration of commercial, cloud-hosted, and on-premise open LLMs in academic settings. AI-VERDE streamlines access management for instructional and research groups by providing features such as robust access control, privacy-preserving mechanisms, native Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) support, budget management for third-party LLM services, and both a conversational web interface and API access. In a pilot deployment at a large public university, AI-VERDE demonstrated significant engagement across diverse educational and research groups, enabling activities that would typically require substantial budgets for commercial LLM services with limited user and team management capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, AI-Verde is the first platform to address both academic and research needs for LLMs within an higher education institutional framework.