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Generative AI with LangChain
Generative AI with LangChain

Generative AI with LangChain: Build large language model (LLM) apps with Python, ChatGPT, and other LLMs

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Generative AI with LangChain

Questions

If you've read and understood this chapter, you should be able to answer these questions:

  1. What is a generative model?
  2. Which applications exist for generative models?
  3. What's a large language model (LLM) and what does it do?
  4. How can we get bigger performance from LLMs?
  5. What are the conditions that make these models possible?
  6. Which companies and organizations are the big players in developing LLMs?
  7. What is a transformer and what does it consist of?
  8. What does GPT mean?
  9. How does stable diffusion work?
  10. How is stable diffusion trained?

If you struggle to answer these questions, please refer back to the corresponding sections in this chapter to make sure you've understood the material.

LangChain for LLM Apps

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have demonstrated immense capabilities in generating human-like text. However, simply accessing LLMs via APIs has limitations. Instead, combining them with other data sources and tools can enable more powerful applications. In this chapter, we will introduce LangChain as a way to overcome LLM limitations and build innovative language-based applications. We aim to demonstrate the potential of combining recent AI advancements with a robust framework like LangChain.

We will start by outlining some challenges faced when using LLMs on their own, like the lack of external knowledge, incorrect reasoning, and the inability to take action. LangChain provides solutions to these issues through different integrations and off-the-shelf components for specific tasks. We will walk through examples of how developers can use LangChain’s capabilities to create customized natural language processing solutions, outlining the components...

Going beyond stochastic parrots

LLMs have gained significant attention and popularity due to their ability to generate human-like text and understand natural language, which makes them useful in scenarios that revolve around content generation, text classification, and summarization. However, their apparent fluency obscures serious deficiencies that constrain real-world utility. The concept of stochastic parrots helps to elucidate this fundamental issue.

Stochastic parrots refers to LLMs that can produce convincing language but lack any true comprehension of the meaning behind words. Coined by researchers Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major in their influential paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots (2021), the term critiques models that mindlessly mimic linguistic patterns. Without being grounded in the real world, models can produce responses that are inaccurate, irrelevant, unethical, or make little logical sense.

Simply scaling...

What is LangChain?

Created in 2022 by Harrison Chase, LangChain is an open-source Python framework for building LLM-powered applications. It provides developers with modular, easy-to-use components for connecting language models with external data sources and services. The project has attracted millions in venture capital funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Benchmark, who supplied funding to Apple, Cisco, Google, WeWork, Dropbox, and many other successful companies.

LangChain simplifies the development of sophisticated LLM applications by providing reusable components and pre-assembled chains. Its modular architecture abstracts access to LLMs and external services into a unified interface. Developers can combine these building blocks to carry out complex workflows.

Building impactful LLM apps involves challenges like prompt engineering, bias mitigation, productionizing, and integrating external data. LangChain reduces this learning curve through its abstractions...

Exploring key components of LangChain

Chains, agents, memory, and tools enable the creation of sophisticated LLM applications that go beyond basic API calls to a single LLM. In the following dedicated subsections on these key concepts, we’ll consider how they enable the development of capable systems by combining language models with external data and services.

We won’t dive into implementation patterns in this chapter; however, we will discuss in more detail what some of these components are good for. By the end, you should have the level of understanding that’s required to architect systems with LangChain. Let’s start with chains!

What are chains?

Chains are a critical concept in LangChain for composing modular components into reusable pipelines. For example, developers can put together multiple LLM calls and other components in a sequence to create complex applications for things like chatbot-like social interactions, data extraction, and...

How does LangChain work?

The LangChain framework simplifies building sophisticated LLM applications by providing modular components that facilitate connecting language models with other data and services. The framework organizes capabilities into modules spanning from basic LLM interaction to complex reasoning and persistence.

These components can be combined into pipelines also called chains that sequence the following actions:

  • Loading documents
  • Embedding for retrieval
  • Querying LLMs
  • Parsing outputs
  • Writing memory

Chains match modules to application goals, while agents leverage chains for goal-directed interactions with users. They repeatedly execute actions based on observations, plan optimal logic chains, and persist memory across conversations.

The modules, ranging from simple to advanced, are:

  • LLMs and chat models: Provide interfaces to connect and query language models like GPT-3. Support async, streaming, and batch...

Comparing LangChain with other frameworks

LLM application frameworks have been developed to provide specialized tooling that can harness the power of LLMs effectively to solve complex problems. A few libraries have emerged that meet the requirements of effectively combining generative AI models with other tools to build LLM applications.

There are several open-source frameworks for building dynamic LLM applications. They all offer value in developing cutting-edge LLM applications. This graph shows their popularity over time (data source: GitHub star history, https://star-history.com/):

Figure 2.11: Comparison of popularity between different frameworks in Python

We can see the number of stars on GitHub over time for each project. Haystack is the oldest of the compared frameworks, having started in early 2020 (as per the earliest GitHub commits). It is also the least popular in terms of stars on GitHub. LangChain, LlamaIndex (previously called GPTIndex), and SuperAGI...

Summary

LLMs produce convincing language but have significant limitations in terms of reasoning, knowledge, and access to tools. The LangChain framework simplifies the building of sophisticated applications powered by LLMs that can mitigate these shortcomings. It provides developers with modular, reusable building blocks like chains for composing pipelines and agents for goal-oriented interactions. These building blocks fit together as LLM apps that come with extended capabilities.

As we saw in this chapter, chains allow sequencing calls to LLMs, databases, APIs, and more to accomplish multi-step workflows. Agents leverage chains to take actions based on observations for managing dynamic applications. Memory persists information across executions to maintain state. Together, these concepts enable developers to overcome the limitations of individual LLMs by integrating external data, actions, and context. In other words, LangChain reduces complex orchestration into customizable...

Questions

Please see if you can come up with answers to these questions. I’d recommend you go back to the corresponding sections of this chapter if you are unsure about any of them:

  1. What are the limitations of LLMs?
  2. What are stochastic parrots?
  3. What are LLM applications?
  4. What is LangChain and why should you use it?
  5. What are LangChain’s key features?
  6. What is a chain in LangChain?
  7. What is an agent?
  8. What is memory and why do we need it?
  9. What kind of tools are available in LangChain?
  10. How does LangChain work?

Join our community on Discord

Join our community’s Discord space for discussions with the authors and other readers:

https://packt.link/lang

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Key benefits

  • Learn how to leverage LangChain to work around LLMs’ inherent weaknesses
  • Delve into LLMs with LangChain and explore their fundamentals, ethical dimensions, and application challenges
  • Get better at using ChatGPT and GPT models, from heuristics and training to scalable deployment, empowering you to transform ideas into reality

Description

ChatGPT and the GPT models by OpenAI have brought about a revolution not only in how we write and research but also in how we can process information. This book discusses the functioning, capabilities, and limitations of LLMs underlying chat systems, including ChatGPT and Gemini. It demonstrates, in a series of practical examples, how to use the LangChain framework to build production-ready and responsive LLM applications for tasks ranging from customer support to software development assistance and data analysis – illustrating the expansive utility of LLMs in real-world applications. Unlock the full potential of LLMs within your projects as you navigate through guidance on fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and best practices for deployment and monitoring in production environments. Whether you're building creative writing tools, developing sophisticated chatbots, or crafting cutting-edge software development aids, this book will be your roadmap to mastering the transformative power of generative AI with confidence and creativity.

Who is this book for?

The book is for developers, researchers, and anyone interested in learning more about LangChain. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer, this book will serve as a valuable resource if you want to get the most out of LLMs using LangChain. Basic knowledge of Python is a prerequisite, while prior exposure to machine learning will help you follow along more easily.

What you will learn

  • Create LLM apps with LangChain, like question-answering systems and chatbots
  • Understand transformer models and attention mechanisms
  • Automate data analysis and visualization using pandas and Python
  • Grasp prompt engineering to improve performance
  • Fine-tune LLMs and get to know the tools to unleash their power
  • Deploy LLMs as a service with LangChain and apply evaluation strategies
  • Privately interact with documents using open-source LLMs to prevent data leaks
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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
What Is Generative AI? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
LangChain for LLM Apps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Started with LangChain Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building Capable Assistants Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Chatbot Like ChatGPT Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Developing Software with Generative AI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
LLMs for Data Science Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Customizing LLMs and Their Output Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Generative AI in Production Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Future of Generative Models Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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(34 Ratings)
5 star 55.9%
4 star 17.6%
3 star 2.9%
2 star 14.7%
1 star 8.8%
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Sarabjit Oct 27, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Product is good but paper cutting is not so smootBook binding issue
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Sohrab Oct 17, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book covers all the model and terminology used in LLMs and options available. Looking forward to carry forward the knowledge and go in depth from here.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Jesper Wulff Jul 16, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
I feel like I've given this book a fair chance. The examples are highly relevant, but it's just too big of a downside that the code doesn't work. It's not just a matter of tweaking a couple of things. And this book is bascially all about the examples because it contains little to no background on the technical details. I recommend just going straight to the langchain website for tutorials instead.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Errol Kutan Jun 13, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
Bought this to ramp up on langchain. First two chapters were a decent amount of non-technical fluff, which is probably fine if this is your first book on modern trends in AI/LLMs.Subsequent chapters actually dive into technical examples of using langchain APIs and integrations with hugging face, open ai, etc. The problem is, very few of the examples work without significant amount of troubleshooting and rejiggering. I'm not talking about "you didnt follow the instructions and forgot to procure an API key". Im talking about "the model in the example just completely doesnt work anymore, even if you have a pro subscription to hugging face hub", or weird versioning issues among the various libraries. Moreover, the github repo doesnt actually have clear chapter specific code, so you cannot just clone the repo and rerun those examples verbatim to rule out any issues local to your setup, or get an updated version of the examples should the models in them have to actually change due to deprecation. The book is fairly new, so it's confusing on why so many things already don't work. IMO, you may be better just going through the langchain walkthroughs.I've gone through other AI books from other publishers and had some issues due to API changes, but at least in those cases, much of it was addressable by reverting to library versions specified or by using the accompanying jupyter notebooks. Also, those issues only popped up 10% of the time.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
SURYADIPTA ROY Jun 05, 2024
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This book could potentially have been of great value given the widespread usage of the LangChain platform. The book itself attempts to cover all the important LLM architectures. Unfortunately, there is little association between the book materials and the code, which makes the book to be of limited value. I have found it very frustrating whenever I have tried to implement the materials covered in the text. The code on GitHub have also been posted in a very haphazard manner and do not have any clear relationship with the text chapters. I sincerely hope that the author will modify the text in the next iteration so that the book is better organized.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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