| ## Introduction 👋 | |
| PrivateGPT provides an **API** containing all the building blocks required to | |
| build **private, context-aware AI applications**. | |
| The API follows and extends OpenAI API standard, and supports both normal and streaming responses. | |
| That means that, if you can use OpenAI API in one of your tools, you can use your own PrivateGPT API instead, | |
| with no code changes, **and for free** if you are running privateGPT in `local` mode. | |
| Looking for the installation quickstart? [Quickstart installation guide for Linux and macOS](/overview/welcome/quickstart). | |
| Do you want to install it on Windows? Or do you want to take full advantage of your hardware for better performances? | |
| The installation guide will help you in the [Installation section](/installation). | |
| ## Frequently Visited Resources | |
| <Cards> | |
| <Card | |
| title="API Reference" | |
| icon="fa-solid fa-code" | |
| href="/api-reference" | |
| /> | |
| <Card | |
| title="Twitter" | |
| icon="fa-brands fa-twitter" | |
| href="https://twitter.com/PrivateGPT_AI" | |
| /> | |
| <Card | |
| title="Discord Server" | |
| icon="fa-brands fa-discord" | |
| href="https://discord.gg/bK6mRVpErU" | |
| /> | |
| </Cards> | |
| ## API Organization | |
| The API is divided in two logical blocks: | |
| 1. High-level API, abstracting all the complexity of a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipeline implementation: | |
| - Ingestion of documents: internally managing document parsing, splitting, metadata extraction, | |
| embedding generation and storage. | |
| - Chat & Completions using context from ingested documents: abstracting the retrieval of context, the prompt | |
| engineering and the response generation. | |
| 2. Low-level API, allowing advanced users to implement their own complex pipelines: | |
| - Embeddings generation: based on a piece of text. | |
| - Contextual chunks retrieval: given a query, returns the most relevant chunks of text from the ingested | |
| documents. | |
| <Callout intent = "info"> | |
| A working **Gradio UI client** is provided to test the API, together with a set of useful tools such as bulk | |
| model download script, ingestion script, documents folder watch, etc. | |
| </Callout> |