We don't expect this to be as good as the latest OpenAI GPT release. This is just to demonstrate that developing a conversation agent using an existing foundation model is not as hard as some may assume. Take a foundation model that is not capable of Q&A and tune it with a fairly small Q&A data and you get your in-house ChatGPT.
Thanks for the feedback. The potential edge with Dolly is huge. Building a firewalled model with custom corpus is a big deal. I have been experimenting with openai and even with public data (but really limiting to the domain), yields great improvements (openai may be stale because of cut off data). I am excited to see where Dolly goes.
Dolly appears to fundamentally be a tech demo advertising how you can use Databricks for compute. I honestly wouldn't expect them to take it that much further, particularly in the context of larger models that would be significantly more expensive to fine-tune. But I'm happy to be proven wrong.
I imagine they will sell fine tuning as a service to Databricks customers. If I put all my data into their lake I too can get my own custom ChatGPT. That's compelling.
Disclaimer: I work at Databricks.