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Using MCP servers from ChatGPT

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  Warning: Following this article implies that you are going to expose local services of your computer openly to the Internet. If you aren’t familiar with running VPN’s and services (and if you do, there is a  good chance you think I’m crazy for merely suggesting this setup) I do not recommend following it. I especially advise you against running tailscale on any of your work devices, unless you want to be fired. You have been warned.   If you have been following AI trends you will have heard about MCP or the Model Context Protocol, and the sudden explosion of mcp servers (thousands of them, if we believe the newly created “MCP registries”). It’s one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect, but caught almost everyone by surprise.   MCP is no more than a standardized way of letting LLM models access “tools”. These tools can be anything that can be accessed by a software, and includes reading and writing local files, accessing databases, browsers, remote API’...
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Building a Data Analyst with OpenWebUI (Part II)

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  In this previous article , I set myself the goal of replicating the Data Analysis functionality of ChatGPT using Open Source tools. The main advantages of this approach would be that it could entirely be run on-premises, which should help to prevent unintended data leaks, and that it would allow for higher customization and integration with your environment and preferences (programming languages, libraries and data sources, etc...). The cornerstone of this attempt is the project OpenWebUI which is a llm web interface which can be extended or modified with several abstractions. In the previous article I directly modified the OpenWebUI code and submitted a PR for substituting the way Tools (the abstraction which allow models to run custom functions) are run so they work better in models that have that capability natively. Sadly, it collided with an important refactorization of the tool and wasn't integrated in the main tree, although the maintainer has plans to implement it in the ...
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Building a Data Analyst with OpenWebUI (Part I)

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  The "Advanced Data Analysis" is my favorite ChatGPT feature. It's one of those features that, once you see it for the first time, the mind can't stop imagining the possibilities it provides. An LLM which can not only generate code but it is able to run and iterate over it! It's simply amazing. But at the same time, it's impossible not to realize its limitations. It runs in some kind of sandbox (apparently based on Google's gVisor), with an ephemeral filesystem and no Internet connection. What if I want to install a new package? Or give it access to my Data Warehouse instead of using simple csv files? What if I prefer R over Python? etc... (Now I know much of these use cases could be implemented using  GPT Actions , but when I learnt about it I was too invested about the OpenWebUI approach. This is probably true also for other approaches, that provide the functionality without so much hassle.) So, when I discovered OpenWebUI, an LLM front-end with extensi...
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Location: Zaragoza, España
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