TritonGPT is Here and Ready to Help

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This story originally appeared in the winter 2025 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as “Hi! My Name is TritonGPT.”

TritonGPT, the latest innovation developed at UC San Diego, is redefining how students, staff, faculty and researchers work together. Its suite of artificial intelligence assistants act as helpers, tutors and collaborators, trained on targeted information to streamline work, learning and research.

In 2023, Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla challenged IT Services to develop a way to harness the power of generative AI to aid staff in administrative work and improve efficiency. Funded by the Office of the Chancellor, TritonGPT’s development began in June 2023, led by IT Services and Operational Strategic Initiatives.

“It was an exciting challenge, and one we were ready for,” says Brett Pollak, executive director at IT Services. “We recognized that generative AI was transforming the technology landscape and appreciated the support to bring it to UC San Diego.”

After a pilot program and phased rollout, TritonGPT launched to all campus and Health Sciences employees in spring 2024, with student access following in June 2025. Hosted securely at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, TritonGPT combines commercial and open-source software, including Onyx, founded by two UC San Diego alumni. Additionally, the secure, on-site hosting ensures the university maintains full control over data usage and sharing.

TritonGPT provides assistants for administrative roles that handle campus-specific questions, summarize documents and more. Faculty can drop their course materials into a special Google Drive that automatically trains instructional assistants on that material to create quizzes, tests, discussion prompts or additional course content. Students can use a virtual tutor based on that material for class-specific questions, accessible through TritonGPT or the Canvas learning management system used in all UC San Diego classes.

“Faculty [members] really like this approach because it’s using their course material as the basis for the responses,” says Pollak. “Additionally, the student-facing assistant is trained to be more Socratic so it doesn’t just provide a direct answer but engages them in a dialogue instead.”

For staff, TritonGPT assistants support hiring tasks, including creating job postings, interview questions and related materials. Another assistant provides coaching on accounting and fund management. Pollak emphasized the value of training the system on curated UC San Diego content, ensuring responses are accurate, current and tailored to the institution.

The effectiveness of TritonGPT has led to licensing at UC Berkeley (BearGPT) and San Diego State (SDSU-GPT) as well as the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and Fairleigh Dickinson University.

“This is a revenue-generating opportunity for UC San Diego,” says Pollak. “Every school has its own branding and name, but we’re running it as a software service for them, augmenting our team to be able to support these other universities that may not have the same environment or resources to create a product like this.”

Try it yourself: TritonGPT has a public-facing assistant to answer your campus questions at blink.ucsd.edu.

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Artificial Intelligence