What is PrivateGPT?
PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that lets you ask questions about your documents using an LLM, with a guarantee that no data ever leaves your execution environment. Offline. Private. Secure.
How It Works
- Ingest your documents (PDF, DOCX, TXT, etc.)
- Documents are split into chunks and embedded locally
- Embeddings are stored in a local vector database
- When you ask a question, relevant chunks are retrieved and sent to a local LLM
- The LLM generates an answer based only on the retrieved context
All of this happens on your machine. No internet. No API calls.
Use Cases
- Legal teams reviewing confidential contracts
- Finance teams analyzing internal reports
- Healthcare organizations processing patient documents
- Researchers working with embargoed data
- Enterprises with strict data governance requirements
Quick Start
pip install private-gpt
privategpt run
PrivateGPT integrates with Ollama for the LLM layer and LlamaIndex for the RAG layer. It exposes both a chat UI and an OpenAI-compatible API.
vs. AnythingLLM
Both are document chat tools. PrivateGPT is lighter and more focused. AnythingLLM has more integrations and a slicker UI. If "zero data leaves the machine" is a hard requirement, both are equally valid — PrivateGPT is simpler to audit.