You’re receiving this email since you’ve signed up for UIUC.chat. We will only email you about product updates. This is our 3rd email in our two-year existence, but we have 1,700 git commits and 600 PRs across our frontend and backend. I hope this is ‘high alpha’ insight into the best uses of LLMs that we’re pushing into production. We are a small team of researchers and everything we build is free, enjoy!

Today we're launching:

1. DeepSeek R1 is FREE on UIUC.chat!
2. Qwen VL 72B, the best Vision Language Model, is FREE on UIUC.chat!
3. New Dashboard page with Sharing like Google Docs
4. New prompt engineering controls and features

And last month we silently launched Guided Learning (Aka Tutor Mode), a whole-new Analysis page and Claude support. That post is well worth a read.

DeepSeek R1 is Free

UIUC.chat now offers free access to DeepSeek R1, a powerful open-weight LLM optimized for reasoning and research. Whether you're tackling complex coursework or need an AI assistant for your studies, you can now leverage DeepSeek R1 at no cost.

To use it, simply go to any project on UIUC.chat, or make a new one, and select that model in the chat window.

We're expanding our self-hosted offerings. We keep updating this as new models are released.

Free VLMs hosted at NCSA

We're now hosting Qwen VL 72B, the best Vision-Language model today. It's extremely powerful, and now available for free to all users.

We self-host these models here at Illinois NCSA, and in the spirit of being a public university, I'm proud to share them publicly to give back to our community and to remove any barrier from people enjoying our app.

Qwen 2.5 VL just launched... waiting on software support

Here's a few of our favorite tweets on Qwen 2.5 VL.

New Dashboard page

Our new Dashboard has two key goals:

1. Make it easier to use our connectors, like Canvas, GitHub, MIT, and website crawling.
2. Elevate the "Share Chatbot" controls, where you can add users and admins to chat with or edit your project.

I'm extremely proud of our delightful Google Docs-like sharing controls.

• Decide if you want your project publicly viewable or totally private. Either way, you can add edit-capable admins to collaborate on building your chatbot.
• If it's private, you may add view-only users who will only see your Chat page, but none of the dashboards.

We're delighted by the redesign to make document ingest even more intuitive.

New Prompt Engineering Features

Now on the Prompting page, you can share customized links that will enable certain prompting features just for that link. This makes it easy to have multiple versions of your chatbot for different users and purposes.

For example, you can share a version of the chatbot that has Guided Learning enabled, which we launched last month. Or you could share a version that focuses the chatbot on your documents only, thereby limiting its outside world knowledge, just for specific critical tasks like reviewing a contract or other legal documents.

The goal is to make your chatbot as customizable as possible, supporting many different users.

Previously, these same controls had to be applied globally to your chatbot. Now they can be applied on a case-by-case basis, giving more flexibility and control to project owners.

Thank you, and if you have any feedback or feature suggestions please just reply to this email and I'll build it for you.

And if you made it this far in the email, consider checking out our Patreon to support us starving students. Everything we build is free thanks to the University of Illinois, NCSA and the NSF.