University of Florida Unveils NaviGator AI, Revolutionizing Self-Service in Higher Education

University of Florida Information Technology has developed and released the first comprehensive, self-service AI platform among U.S. higher education institutions, giving students, faculty, and staff access to safe and broad AI services and further injecting AI into the university’s daily educational and business practices.

NaviGator AI comprises chat, toolkit, and assistant capabilities. NaviGator AI Chat was custom-built to allow UF faculty, students, and staff to interact with their data in a private, GPT-like environment using their choice of Large Language Models, or LLMs. The NaviGator AI Toolkit provides direct access to several LLMs powering various types of applications across campus.

Since the soft launch of NaviGator AI Chat and Toolkit in July, nearly 1,000 faculty, students, and staff have generated an equivalent of 3.4 million pages.

The private environment guarantees user data is not used in the training of any available model. Each LLM is encoded with human values and goals to ensure the responses are not harmful or illegal and are as reliable as possible.

NaviGator AI Chat can generate concise summaries of documents and review written drafts, such as class notes, emails, books, and research papers. Users can also generate artwork and logos, create study plans, write code, and receive help with challenging subjects. To get started with NaviGator AI, visit https://it.ufl.edu/ai/uf-navigator-ai/ and login with your GatorLink.

“The launch of NaviGator AI marks a significant milestone in our AI journey,” said Elias Eldayrie, UF’s vice president and chief information officer. “This initiative reflects our dedication to enhancing research, education, and the overall academic experience.”

NaviGator AI is powered by UF’s supercomputer, HiPerGator — the first and most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a U.S. university. HiPerGator has 1,120 NVIDIA A100 80 gigabyte GPUs. The UF-NVIDIA partnership, established in 2019, enabled UF to expand its supercomputing ecosystem to include AI computational capabilities through HiPerGator.

Navigator AI currently hosts 26 LLMs, including NVIDIA Inference Microservices (NIMs) for Meta’s Llama, Mistral, and ESMFold protein; OpenAI’s GPT and DALL-E; Google’s Gemini; Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion; and Anthropic’s Claude.

NaviGator AI is the most recent achievement in UF’s position as a national leader in AI innovation and upholds the university’s vision to prepare every student, faculty, and staff member to be empowered AI users. The UF-NVIDIA partnership shaped UF as the first AI university. UF has since pioneered AI integration across the curriculum through faculty support, innovative teaching and learning solutions, and AI training opportunities open to all campus members.

University of Florida Information Technology is expanding the suite to accelerate this adoption and bring the university one step closer to AI as a practice.