LangChain is an open-source project that was launched in October 2022 by Harrison Chase while working at Robust Intelligence. The project gained traction and community engagement rapidly, and continues to receive contributions on GitHub. It is a framework designed to facilitate the development of applications powered by language models and goes beyond just utilizing a language model by emphasizing two key aspects: making applications data-aware and enabling language models to interact with their environment.
LangChain is a versatile framework that offers several functionalities and use cases. These include:
ChatGPT might be the most famous language model out there right now, integrated with the GPT-3.5-Turbo model in the free version with 156 billion parameters (or GPT-4 in the paid version, rumored to have trillions of parameters), but many other companies and institutions have published other LLMs that are available to use. To name a few, there’s AI21 Labs’ Jurassic-1 Jumbo (178B parameters), Aleph Alpha’s Luminous Supreme (70B parameters), and Cohere XLarge (52B parameters). Each of them have their own API or use method, so testing their capabilities means making specific code to integrate with each one.
LangChain allows for seamless transitions between 20+ LLM providers, allowing users to quickly switch between different models and leverage the unique capabilities, domain expertise, and performance variations of those models. This enables them to optimize their results and meet the specific requirements of their tasks and applications.
LLMs are known to receive a prompt and generate a response or carry out a task. It can be useful to generate prompts in a reproducible manner, which is where prompt templates come in handy. Prompt engineering lies at the core of prompt templates, using various components to generate desired outputs. These components consist of instructions, external information or context, user input or query, and output indicators.
LangChain makes it easy to create and work with prompts. Users can work with existing templates that accept any number of input variables into the template string or they can create their own custom prompt templates that format the prompt in ways they want it to. It is also possible to pass one shot examples to prompts, and to pick and choose which examples to use from a list of them. Overall, LangChain facilitates the construction and utilization of user-tailored templates.
LLMs might be very impressive for their knowledge, but their functionality is limited to a single action: producing text. A lot of use cases for products and applications might demand going beyond this and making the LLM able to interact with other programs and perform various actions such as search for things on Google, add items to our calendar, publish changes to a webpage, etc.
LangChain provides the functionality necessary to do so. Using Chains and Agents, it is possible to build intricate multi-step workflows that enable LLMs to interact and execute actions within complex data pipelines or software applications. Chains serve as simple connectors between LLMs and prompts, or other chains. Meanwhile, Agents make decisions based on LLM outputs, execute tools, and record observations until the tasks are completed. Tools are functions designed to perform specific tasks, which can involve interactions with the outside world, like Google Search.
These features provided by LangChain hold immense promise, as they unlock the potential for LLMs to bridge the gap between knowledge generation and practical real-world applications.
Memory is crucial for coherence and context in conversations as it enables the model to reference previous messages and build upon the conversation's history. When coding a chatbot, we need to make sure we keep a history of the conversation and ingest that in the model every time a new answer is generated.
LangChain provides a diverse range of memory types and functionalities, offering various ways to save chat history. Users can save all previous messages, preserve a specified number of interactions, or create a summary of past interactions. Additionally, LangChain allows for saving message memory to a database such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Postgres, or Redis. It supports the creation of custom memory classes and the utilization of specialized memory servers like Motörhead and Zep, that are designed for AI chat apps. These functionalities provide flexibility and enable the language model to effectively store, retrieve, and utilize information for more context-aware and informed conversations.
Using machine learning to extract information from documents is crucial for automating and accelerating the retrieval of valuable insights from large volumes of unstructured text data. It eliminates manual effort and time-consuming processes, and improves data accuracy and consistency by reducing human errors and biases.
LangChain simplifies the extraction of knowledge from documents by providing convenient ways to load documents and access saved information. It offers functionalities such as document loaders, text splitters, embeddings, and vector stores. These tools allow for efficient indexing, searching, and retrieval of information based on semantic meaning and contextual understanding. LangChain's indexing capabilities, particularly with vector databases, enhance the speed and accuracy of information retrieval from large collections of unstructured text data.
In summary, LangChain offers a comprehensive set of functionalities that expand the capabilities of language models, making them more adaptable, interactive, context-aware, and efficient in various applications. With its open-source nature and growing community support, LangChain has the potential to revolutionize the way we build applications.
