Dolly

About Dolly

Dolly is an open-source, instruction-following large language model developed by Databricks, notable as the first commercially licensed instruction-tuned LLM. Built on EleutherAI's Pythia architecture and fine-tuned on approximately 15,000 instruction-response pairs generated by Databricks employees, Dolly demonstrated that effective instruction-following could be achieved with relatively modest fine-tuning data. Available in three model sizes (2.8B, 6.9B, and 12B parameters), Dolly enables organizations to deploy AI-powered chatbots, summarizers, and Q&A systems without licensing costs or API dependencies. The model supports seven capability domains: brainstorming, classification, closed-book QA, generation, information extraction, open-book QA, and summarization. Databricks has been transparent about Dolly's limitations — it struggles with complex syntax, programming, mathematics, and factual accuracy. The project entered maintenance mode in April 2023, with Databricks shifting development to DBRX, their original LLM built from scratch. Dolly remains an important historical milestone in the open-source AI ecosystem.